


By the Blood of My Brother Kept Safe

by Ningikuga



Series: Brothers of Blood and Magic [1]
Category: That Guy with the Glasses/Channel Awesome
Genre: Implied Sexual Content, Occult Content, Other, Polyamorous relationship, Rather A Lot Of Blood, alcohol use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-18
Updated: 2015-05-18
Packaged: 2018-03-31 01:53:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3959989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ningikuga/pseuds/Ningikuga
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A rogue planetoid threatens the Earth, interrupting one of the Nostalgia Critic's schemes.  With Oancitizen's help, Linkara discovers a spell that might save the world - but at the cost of an innocent(ish) life!</p>
            </blockquote>





	By the Blood of My Brother Kept Safe

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this rather complex prompt](http://tgwtg-meme.livejournal.com/1329.html?thread=1746737#t1746737) on the TGWTG kinkmeme over on LJ. Intended to take place in the shared Awesomeverse of the anniversary crossovers, although don't think too hard about the implied timeline relative to _To Boldly Flee_. (As an additional content warning, one character commits an unplanned act of minor self-harm during the story, in case that's triggery for anyone.)
> 
> Thanks to butterflyslinky for the beta job. Any remaining errors are all mine. This work is intended to depict characters/personae, not real people, and no implications about the people who write and play those characters are intended or should be inferred.

“Well, I suppose you’re all wondering why I’ve gathered you here today!” the Nostalgia Critic chirped to the room full of dour and half-sodden reviewers.

“Not really,” Phelous drawled, and was affirmed with a chorus of tired nods. The early morning fog had given way to midmorning drizzle just as the clump of taxies had arrived from the airport and train station, pouring out a crowd onto the sidewalk in front of an all-too-familiar house. The grumbling of luggage wheels on concrete had sounded like the world’s least impressive stampede.

He hadn’t even gotten them a single hotel room between them. For the moment, the damp luggage was all piled haphazardly in the Critic’s garage.

Critic put his hands on his hips and harrumphed at his assembled employees. “What a lack of imagination! Honestly, I’m disappointed in all of you,” he chided.

The Cinema Snob glanced up at the ceiling. “Would it happen to involve a half-assed wild-goose chase after some treasure you’re not sure actually exists?” he asked drily.

“Some treasure that also has some sort of rumor or curse attached to it, that you conveniently don’t believe in, despite it having ruined at least one prior owner?” Film Brain continued.

The Nostalgia Chick finished, “And which we couldn’t actually sell without attracting uncomfortable levels of legal scrutiny, anyway?”

“That’s the one!” the Critic cheered. His brow furrowed suddenly. “Say, did one of you hack my e-mail again?”

The crowd groaned and began to shuffle off the couches, reaching for their coats and shoes. “Not again,” murmured someone in the back, followed by a “never again” from a more strongly accented voice off to the left.

“SIT DOWN!” the Critic roared, and they dropped back into their seats. He paced back and forth, scowling. “Look,” he continued, at a slightly lower volume, “I realize that I’ve led you into trouble, even serious trouble, before.” He spread his hands at his sides. “I admit it! I’ve screwed up. I’ve even put several of you in physical and emotional danger. But I think you’re all forgetting one thing.” He crossed his arms and drew himself up to his full height; even the cap seemed to grow an inch taller. “I happen to be your boss,” he growled, “and if you pussy out on me now, I will fire every single one of your pathetic asses!”

An exasperated sigh rippled through the room. Finally, the Rap Critic raised a hand. “Look,” he said, “I wasn’t along for the last three escapades -”

“Four,” Angry Joe muttered behind him, glaring daggers towards the front of the room.

“- Four escapades,” Rap Critic corrected. “But I kind of got the impression that part of why those ended up so badly was a lack of planning. Maybe this time you can explain your goals at the beginning, so we can actually have a reasonable plan of attack before we go marching out of here on your orders.”

“But then we’d have a massive exposition dump right at the beginning of the story,” Phelous complained in a sing-song voice, “and we absolutely can’t have _that_.”

The Rap Critic shot a questioning look at Phelous, whose attention had already wandered. Before he could pick up again, something in Linkara’s pocket started beeping.

“What have I told you all about turning your ringers off during corporate meetings?” the Critic raged.

Linkara shook his head. “That’s not my phone,” he explained, removing something that nevertheless looked like an old flip-style phone from his pocket. “It’s a priority alert from Comicron-1.”

Paw appeared at his elbow. “Priority alert for what?” he asked, craning his neck over Linkara’s shoulder to see.

“Actually, I’ve never heard this particular alarm before,” Linkara admitted. He flipped the communicator open to display a small viewscreen and an array of blinking lights. Almost all of them were flashing, and several were flashing red. “Go ahead, Nimue,” he said into the handset.

“Priority Alert: Collision warning, Category 5,” said the voice of his ship’s computer.

“Take appropriate evasive action!” Linkara replied. “Are you under attack?” Goodness knows he had enough enemies, but things had been so quiet lately -

“The object of the collision is not this unit,” the voice answered.

Linkara blinked at the handset. “Then why are you calling me?” he asked. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Sci-Fi Guy’s eyes flare; he reached for his laptop and flipped it open, dropping out of Linkara’s line of sight.

“The object of the collision,” Nimue said, “is the Earth.”

\---

Finding a cable that led from the communicator handset to Sci-Fi Guy’s laptop took entirely too long; they finally found one that almost worked in Todd in the Shadows’s keyboard case and an appropriate adaptor in Nash’s emergency toolbox. Nimue’s download speed, while normally incredibly speedy by most standards, seemed to Linkara to have slowed to a trickle. Or perhaps he was just feeling impatient.

The first still images weren’t all that alarming. The object was a charcoal-grey melon hanging in space, a dull and lightly pockmarked sphere, and there was no impression of speed; its position relative to the fixed stars behind it barely changed from photo to photo.

“That doesn’t look all that bad,” the Critic noted with studied disinterest. “Not bad enough to interrupt an important business meeting.”

Sci-Fi Guy turned to stare at him in horror. “It’s big enough to be spherical under its own gravity,” he said, as if that were supposed to explain anything. Given how many faces in the crowd paled at that, apparently it did.

Linkara swallowed. “Um, exactly how big does that make it?”

“Around ten quadrillion metric tons, or more, depending on what it’s made of,” Sci-Fi Guy answered.

“This unit estimates that it is roughly 900 kilometers in diameter,” Nimue stated from the handset. Oancitizen made a choking noise and suddenly appeared opposite Paw, staring at the laptop screen.

“What does that mean?” Critic demanded. “Is it dangerous?”

“As that size, it would be dangerous even if it were only on a near-miss trajectory with Earth,” Oan explained. “If you stood on its surface, you would have weight.”

“Not much,” Paw agreed, “but you couldn’t reach escape velocity by jumping.”

“It could cause massive tidal changes, even earthquakes,” Sci-Fi Guy finished. “And that’s just by passing too near us.”

“Which it will not,” Nimue said. The room breathed a sigh of relief. Linkara brushed a drop of sweat from his forehead and asked, “So how close will it pass?”

“It will not,” Nimue repeated. “It is currently headed on a direct collision course with the Earth. Approximate location of the center of impact is in northern Quebec.”

The room was quiet except for a single nervous chuckle from the back. A long minute passed before Critic broke the silence by clearing his throat. “Come again?” he asked, addressing Linkara’s handset.

“The probability of impact with the Earth is 100%,” Nimue stated. “Probability of impact between latitude 52 degrees north and latitude 56 degrees north: 99.6%. Probability of impact between longitude 56 degrees west and longitude 80 degrees west: 95%. Probability of time to impact between 18 hours 40 minutes and 19 hours 10 minutes: 99.9%.”

Phelous nodded slowly. “So, sometime right before or around 5 AM, a meteor the size of a small moon of Jupiter is going to crash into eastern Canada.”

“That is a reasonably correct summary,” the handset replied. “Technically, it will not be a meteor until it enters the Earth’s atmosphere.”

Phelous shrugged. “Figures.”

Another long silence fell over the room, punctuated only by the faint crackle of static from Linkara’s handset and the curiously loud ticking of a clock in the next room. 

Nella hiccuped abruptly and was hastily escorted into the kitchen by Maven of the Eventide. Whether the wailing that promptly erupted from there was Nella’s or Maven’s was hard to tell, as the other joined in shortly afterwards. It was followed by snuffling noises from the corner where Film Brain and 8-Bit Mickey had settled, a low-pitched whimpering from the Critic, and Oancitizen singing what might have been a passage from Mozart’s Requiem very softly to himself.

Linkara waved his arms around, trying to keep everyone’s attention. “Wait, wait! Before we panic, let’s see if there’s anything we can do about it.” He addressed his ship’s AI again. “Nimue, can Comicron-1 blast it to smithereens?”

“Linkara, it’s the size of a moon,” Sci-Fi Guy reminded him. “Normally, to blow up things that size, you have to send in some farm kid to blow up the main reactor core. And this doesn’t have a reactor core.” He paused, hope glimmering in his eyes. “Hey, does this thing -”

“It does not,” Nimue answered before he could finish, “and no, this unit’s weapons array is insufficient to do significant damage more than a kilometer below the surface on an object of its size.”

Angry Joe spoke up. “What about Comicron-1 plus the satellite? I’ve got some pretty big surprises tucked away; I could blast it -”

“Scanning. No, even at very close range, the combined armament of this unit plus the satellite would, at best, completely fragment the surface of the planetoid to a depth of one-point-six kilometers. The area of impact would increase by up to 5%, but the total mass on impact would be the same to within two percent,” the ship’s computer declared.

Linkara pressed his unoccupied palm to his forehead. “Okay, we can’t blow it up,” he said, more to himself than to Nimue. “Can we divert it? If we make a soft landing on it and then fire the main engines, can we push it off course?”

A wireframe schematic popped up on Sci-Fi Guy’s laptop screen. The first play-through showed the planetoid approaching Earth and impacting a few hundred miles west of Labrador City. Critic recoiled, snatching his hands to his chest as if he thought the screen might burn them.

“Is that . . . is that to scale?” he whispered, as the northern half of Quebec disappeared under the planetoid. Apparently he hadn’t realized what a 900 kilometer diameter meant, exactly.

“Yes,” Nimue said. “Replaying with thrust from Comicron-1. What direction?”

“North,” Linkara said. “I mean, in the direction that the North Pole is pointing, not North relative to the surface of the Earth.”

The scenario replayed itself. A tiny green triangle left orbit, attached itself to the planetoid, and fired a barely-visible orange rocket. This time, the course of the planetoid was changed, but only barely; the impact point was just south of Baffin Island.

“That’s actually pretty impressive,” Paw noted. “Given its size and how fast it’s moving, I wouldn’t have guessed you could move it a visible amount at this scale at all.”

“She’s a great ship,” Linkara replied, pride and a bit of smugness dancing on his lips.

“But it’s not enough.” Critic had become very quiet and very serious. He watched the two scenarios play out on the computer screen again. “I don’t - I’m not a science guy, particularly. What does that kind of impact mean?”

Sci-Fi Guy and Paw exchanged a look, as if neither one of them wanted to break the bad news to their boss. “Well, I could guess,” Sci-Fi Guy said carefully, “but we probably ought to ask someone who knows more about biosciences.” Sage opened his mouth as if he were about to speak, then stopped at the glare Paw was shooting at him and shrugged.

“I’ll make a Skype call,” Linkara sighed.

\---

Insano wasn’t cackling, wasn’t rubbing his hands together in glee, wasn’t even saying much. Surely this was a very bad sign.

“Well, have you got anything?” Linkara asked, already afraid he knew the answer.

Insano puffed his cheeks out and let out a long breath, then pinched the bridge of his nose. “Well, you see, there are a lot of variables,” he explained, “and the data you sent me doesn’t cover all of them, so there’s only so much I can extrapolate, even given my mastery of Science!”

Critic nudged Linkara over and plopped himself down in front of the monitor Insano was speaking from. “Give us the good news first,” he commanded.

Looking off-camera, Insano consulted a device making an insistent sloshing noise. “Linkara, my arch-nemesis,” he said, and then stopped to poke at a switch.

Linkara was starting to think Insano was stalling. “What?”

“My enemy, my ally. How many people can you fit aboard your spacecraft?”

“Huh?” That struck Linkara as a complete non-sequitur. “I don’t know. Maybe a thousand or so if we pack them into the cargo bays like teenage girls at a Beatles concert. Why?”

“Can’t do that,” Insano muttered. “Have to have food and water supplies for all of them, and room enough to sleep, at least in shifts. Half that number, then.”

“I asked you why!” Linkara half-shouted, trying to draw his occasionally-useful nemesis’s attention.

“Because it’s the only ark we have, as far as I know,” Insano said, turning to face the camera directly. 

Critic slumped in his chair. “So, this thing will destroy human civilization as we know it, then.”

“Not exactly,” Insano corrected him. “Or, no, I should say - yes, of course, human civilization will be gone, but that’s because all humans will be gone. _Everything_ will be gone. Buildings in the same hemisphere as the impact will be scoured to the ground by the shock wave, and the massive tsunamis and earthquakes will take care of the other side of the planet.” He ran a gloved hand over his hair. “Given the uncertainty of the exact impact speed of the object and whether it will make a water or dry landing, I can’t tell you for certain whether it will destroy _all life on the fucking planet_ or not.”

Linkara swallowed. Surely this was just Insano exaggerating, like he always did. “All life?” It had to be hyperbole.

“But there’s about a 50/50 chance it will.” Insano leaned back in his own chair; he looked tired, drained. “If anything survives that kind of collision at all, it’s in the deep ocean, especially the Pacific rifts. That’s the best-case scenario, with a land impact directly on the Canadian Shield; anything above the ocean’s surface or within about a hundred feet of it is scoured clean, boiled, smothered, or starved, but anything that lives below that has a shot. If the impact point is off to the west and it hits Alaska, it’ll set off the entire Ring of Fire in addition to its own effects, and what the meteor doesn’t destroy, the volcanoes will.” His voice faltered. “A total fucking loss, game over.”

Linkara felt his heart sinking in his chest. “I don’t suppose you have a disintegrator ray big enough to make a dent in it?” he asked.

“Not enough power, even if I could get one working,” Insano said, shaking his head. “I could cobble up a bomb big enough to break it into a few big pieces, but by the time we got it there, it wouldn’t make a difference - the individual chunks hitting the Earth in close proximity would cause just about as much damage on impact, and make the dust-cloud-blotting-out-the-sun part of the problem worse.” He looked at Linkara; it was hard to tell behind the goggles, but Linkara’s best guess was he was glaring at him. “If I’d known three days ago, we could have blown it up in time for the pieces to spread out. Most of them would miss. We’d have a few hits, lose a few cities, gain a couple of new craters and probably a tsunami somewhere, but most of civilization would survive.” His voice rose as he stood up and leaned into the camera. “I’d still have a world to conquer!”

“Surely you realize there are bigger problems than world domination at the moment,” Sage said quietly from somewhere behind Linkara’s left shoulder. Linkara’s heart leapt into his throat for a moment; he hadn’t even realized Sage was still in the room.

Insano flung himself back into his chair. “Yes, I do, of course I fucking do!” he screeched. He shook his head to compose himself. “Which is why I was asking about the spaceship. So, five hundred people, more or less, plus supplies. I’ll have to settle for cell samples for most of the flora and fauna and clone them when we reach a new homeworld. Can your AI find a habitable planet we can use?”

“I’m sure there are several in Nimue’s databanks,” Linkara answered, “but they’re a long way away.” He frowned, and closed his hand into a fist; it felt wrong - it was running away from a fight, leaving most of the planet to certain doom. “There’s got to be something else we can do,” he said, trying to sound more firm than he felt.

“Tell you what,” the Critic interrupted, “let’s work on that as Plan B. Maybe even Plan C. But work on it, okay, Doc? You, you get those cell samples ready, and we’ll keep the line open if we get anywhere.”

Insano looked directly into the camera and attempted to smile. It was a horrible, hollow ghost of mirth. “You won’t,” he said. “But I’ll be ready when you call back.”

Linkara reached for the mouse and minimized the window on the monitor. “I’ll keep looking for something,” he announced, turning back to face the Critic and the assembled reviewers. “Maybe we can teleport it; we know we have several devices capable of that on a much smaller scale.”

Angry Joe exchanged a look with Sci-Fi Guy. “We thought about that already,” he said, “and we figured it would be possible if we had either a couple of days longer or a hell of a lot more power than we know we can scrounge up.”

“Okay, you guys keep working on that, and we’ll call it Plan B,” the Critic declared. He turned towards Linkara and tugged his cap down. “Okay, hero,” he murmured, “come up with plan A, because if we end up going with Insano’s Plan C, he and I are going to kill each other figuring out who’s the leader of our brave new world.”

“I’m working on it,” Linkara said, again wishing he felt as sure as he sounded.

\---

Angry Joe scribbled something illegible on the corner of the whiteboard someone had stolen off of the refrigerator, and then threw the pen across the room. “I still think we should try blasting the hell out of it,” he growled. “The worst case scenario is it doesn’t help, right? It can’t actually make the situation worse.”

“There’s not a lot worse it can get than a 50% chance of the extinction of all life on the planet,” Sage observed.

“You got anything better?” Angry Joe roared; the clump of reviewers by the kitchen door cringed at the noise.

The Cinema Snob emerged from the door to the basement clutching a half-full bottle of something a dark shade of amber to his chest. “Bourbon, maybe,” he suggested.

Linkara snorted at that. “We are not going to face the potential destruction of humanity stinking drunk,” he stated flatly.

The Snob shrugged. “Speak for yourself,” he said, and wandered off, bottle in hand, to the corner where Phelous was silently cradling an anxious Lupa.

Angry Joe retrieved the marker and added a couple of capacitors to the diagram. “Whatever, man, I think we should hit it with everything we’ve got.”

Paw shook his head. “It won’t help,” he sighed. “I mean, you’re right, it won’t hurt, but it won’t help, either. The teleportation idea looks like our best bet right now, and if Insano’s numbers are anything close to right, it mostly boosts the probability of the deep ocean surviving. We can’t get rid of the bulk of the mass of the thing, just whittle away chunks until the power runs out, and the teleporters end up being more efficient for that than the heavy weaponry.”

“Well, keep working on it,” Linkara encouraged them. “If we can get a big enough power boost, maybe that, plus Joe’s satellite hitting it with all he’s got, plus Comicron-1 giving it a shove, can change it into a glancing blow instead of a direct hit.”

“Aye-aye, captain,” Paw said as Sci-Fi Guy started Nimue’s simulation program again and ran his hand through his hair.

Morale was clearly already starting to unravel, but Linkara wasn’t sure what to do about it, short of standing on a chair and making a big heroic speech. And that ran the very real possibility of being snarked by Phelous or the Cinema Snob, which might be worse than nothing at all. Linkara drifted over to the overstuffed chair where the Nostalgia Chick and Nella were quietly sharing what appeared to be a bottle of extremely cheap gin.

“Not you, too,” Linkara moaned.

“We’re not actually drunk yet,” the Chick said, swirling the contents of her glass. Nella nodded, but she seemed considerably less steady.

Linkara sighed and pulled up an ottoman next to them. “You guys got any ideas?”

“Fresh out,” the Chick admitted. “Other than the one Snob already proposed, and presumably that would come after either the blowing shit up part or the running the hell away part.”

“I kind of hate that one,” Linkara said, “but it’s really not looking good otherwise. Nimue’s run a hundred simulations, and the best we can get requires several orders of magnitude more energy than we have, for an impact that still probably wipes out all life on land, just not as quickly.”

“But the ocean survives?” Nella whispered, barely audible over the background noise.

“Maybe.” Linkara propped his head up on one hand; the level of uncertainty of the last couple of runs was both enough to give him some faint hope and to make him worry they were chasing pipe dreams. “It depends a lot on exactly when the planetoid arrives.”

“I would have thought,” Oancitizen said from the couch behind them, “that that would be one of the easiest predictions. Surely by now you’ve been able to measure its velocity.”

Linkara turned around, then put a hand on the back of the couch and vaulted over it into the empty spot next to Oancitizen. “It would be,” he agreed, “except that both shooting it and teleporting away chunks of it change both its overall speed and its direction, in ways that are pretty sensitive to exactly how we hit it and what with.”

Oan looked at him over a copy of _Lucifer’s Hammer_ he’d borrowed from the Critic’s bookshelves. “I was under the impression that you had some fairly heavy-duty armaments at your disposal,” he said.

“For ship-to-ship combat, yes,” Linkara agreed. “But not ship-to-planet, even a small one like this.” A memory of speaking to an empty room rippled up from somewhere. “Say,” he continued, “didn’t you review a movie a little like this?”

Oancitizen put the book down and closed his eyes; the look that crossed his face was hard to read. “ _Melancholia_. Yes.” He leaned back against the couch, tilting his head back. “Although for that one, of course, the interloper planet was much bigger than the earth. It swallowed us instead of striking. This one might be Sanguinus, instead.”

Linkara felt like he was losing the thread of the conversation; he tried to steer it back to familiar territory. “You always do a ton of research for your shows. I don’t suppose you found anything helpful when you were doing that one?”

Oan’s eyelids squeezed tighter together. “If you were anyone else here,” he said softly, “I would say no. For a great many reasons.”

“But you did? Is that what you’re saying?” That should have made Linkara feel hopeful; why was his chest tightening instead?

“I found . . . something.” Oan seemed to shrink into himself. “The Earth is overdue for a meteor strike,” he went on, “several centuries overdue by some measures,” and then he fell silent again.

Linkara leaned closer. “Then - you found that something’s protecting us?” he asked, but even before the words were out, he knew that wasn’t right.

Oan shook his head slowly. “Not outside of us, no.” His voice was almost a whisper.

Did he not want someone else here to overhear him? Linkara shifted so his torso would block most of the rest of the room. “What do you mean by ‘us’?” he asked, lowering his own voice.

“Humanity, in the broad sense,” Oan said, his voice still low but slightly stronger. “Or perhaps I should say, humanity and its - allies.” His breathing shifted, getting slower and deeper.

Linkara was about to ask him what he meant when a familiar feeling prickled across his skin. He resisted the urge to jump back. “Not technology, then,” he realized aloud. “Magic?”

“Precisely.” Oan took another deep breath and opened his eyes; the sensation faded immediately.

Linkara lowered his voice again. “I didn’t think you were a magic user, Oancitizen,” he said, genuinely surprised.

“I’m not, exactly,” Oan replied. “Not the same way you are. I have little talent, at least where the pragmatic aspects are involved. But the symbolism of it - so much of what we name as art and science was tied up in magic and alchemy until the very recent past, and to meaningfully engage art without at least a basic understanding of the underpinnings of Western magic leaves one blind to many of the deeper meanings.” He straightened up and allowed himself a small smile. “Which means that from your perspective, as an actual practitioner of the Hermetic arts, I’m a dabbler who plays around with Tarot and Qabalah on occasion.”

“So you know just enough to be dangerous.” Linkara had to grin at that. It was easy to think of Oancitizen as much more harmless than most of the rest of the reviewers, in an ivory tower atop an arthouse cinema. Really, he should have known better; Oan dealt with review matter that would turn the stomachs of everyone there except for the Snob, Phelous, and maybe Sage when he was scraping the bottom of the hentai barrel.

“I know a great deal more than that,” Oan admitted. “I can _do_ just enough to get myself in trouble. I suspect I’d be flattering myself to think it’d be dangerous for anyone else.”

Linkara filed that tidbit of information away for later. “You said you found something related to the meteoroid.”

“Apparently, for a significant portion of the classical and medieval periods, several groups of magi had a standard procedure in place for dealing with ‘ill-omened stars’,” Oan said, his voice weakening again. “It turns out that if one looks in the proper place for correlations between the four humors - blood, in particular, although I didn’t know that at the time - and rogue planets, one might discover how comets and meteors were dealt with.” He paused to wet his lips. “But it’s not pretty.”

“I can deal with messy,” Linkara blurted. Hope was starting to rise again.

“It’s significantly worse than messy,” Oan sighed. Cautiously, he leaned over and slid a digital tablet from under the couch. Linkara waited while Oan skipped through several screens of text and two passwords; the laser printer across the room whirred to life.

Oan nodded towards the printer. “Read that,” he ordered, “and then let me know if you can deal with - with the requirements.”

Linkara leapt across the room; what was Oancitizen thinking, printing a spell on an ordinary printer and leaving it where anyone - Linkara’s eyes darted to Sage - could pick it up? Especially when he’d been so cautious before? Linkara snatched the stack of pages off of the printer; Film Brain looked up from his position slumped against the floor and stared at him in confusion.

Film Brain’s eyes were red. Had he been crying? His face was dry now, if he had been.

No one else seemed to have noticed the printer going off, except possibly for the Chick, who was still too occupied with bad gin and a tipsy Nella to pay much attention. Linkara turned back towards Oancitizen’s couch, then thought better of it and headed for the only place he knew he could get some privacy.

Shutting the bathroom door behind him, Linkara unfolded the stack of paper and realized why Oancitizen hadn’t been concerned about printing it in a crowded room. The page was an image, a scan of what had clearly been a reproduction of an ancient grimoire, and the writing was a mess of curlicues tumbling across the paper like eddies in a river. For an instant, he wondered whether Oancitizen had been putting him on. But no, that sort of sick joke was more Phelous’s wheelhouse, and as Linkara stared at it, the whirling quill strokes seemed to resolve into words. 

They were clearly not English, at least not to begin with. Linkara had no idea how he was reading them, but he understood them, could even pronounce them, despite the grammar being all wrong and the letterforms like nothing he’d ever seen before. Some of them even resolved into Latin in his mind’s eye, so it wasn’t just his subconscious translating them somehow; this was magical writing of a type completely new to him. Although, “new” was probably exactly the wrong word. This was a copy of a copy of something ancient and powerful; he could hear energies crackling in the words as he read them.

The description was straightforward, although the mage who had originally written this clearly had only the vaguest idea what a meteor was and didn’t meaningfully distinguish between falling stars, comets, meteors, and planets that had wandered from their orbits. The spell didn’t distinguish, either; it would take care of any of them, and while the precise method of their removal was a little vague, it promised to be effective even at very short range. Earthbound wizards wouldn’t have had satellites and spaceships to sound alarms with even nineteen hours’ notice.

It required a big ritual. Candles, chanters, a chorus to provide enough magical energy to power the spell without permanently injuring any of the participants. Right, Linkara occasionally forgot about that side effect; having a hat that protected him from it came in handy. Dance steps, but fortunately very simple ones, barely more than walking sideways around in a circle. A drummer; that might be hard to get on short notice. Could Todd or Rap Critic drum? Symbols, sigils drawn on the ground in flour - that might take a while - and on . . .

On . . .

“ _What?_ ”

Paw knocked on the door of the bathroom. “Hey, everything okay in there?”

“Fine!” Linkara shouted back. “I’m fine, everything’s fine, be out in a minute!” The sudden pulse of heat at his side told him he wasn’t alone in his outrage, although he probably shouldn’t have yelped like that. He splashed some water on his face from the sink, hoping he wouldn’t be too red in the face.

He flung the door open, turned into the living room, and wound his way back across the floor to Oancitizen, the pages crumpled in his hand. As he dropped back down onto the couch, Oan set his book aside again and gave him a sympathetic and slightly embarrassed look.

“Can you actually read that?” Linkara asked, flattening the first page again with a sweaty palm.

“With great concentration and some difficulty,” Oan conceded, inclining his head slightly. “It took quite some time the first time. Familiarity improves it.”

“Where did you find something like that?”

“You’d be amazed what university libraries can have tucked away in their special collections rooms,” Oan answered with a wistful smile. “Half the time they don’t have the slightest idea of what they possess, themselves. This one was at the University of Maryland.”

Linkara pondered that for a moment. “May I ask what’s in the rest of the grimoire?”

Oan chewed at his lip. “Several spells I couldn’t make heads or tails of, one that was intended to summon an angel - a seraph, to be precise - several that were intended to summon minor demons or elementals, and one for increasing the fertility and drought-resistance of gardens and fields.”

Linkara rubbed at his eyes with one hand; his stomach was churning. “Three guesses what that last one entailed.”

“What fertility spells always entail, of course,” Oan agreed, although he seemed less disturbed by the idea than Linkara expected.

“Did you read all of this one?”

“I did.” Oan’s face grew quite serious. “I tried to warn you.”

“Yeah, I just - I guess -” Linkara shuddered. “You know we can’t use that. _I_ can’t use that.” 

Oancitizen didn’t reply; he glanced out of the window, watching as a car passed by on the street outside. A bird flitted past, and the breeze from its wings shook droplets from the shrubs along the sidewalk.

Linkara pressed onward, “That’s not - it’s the blackest of black magic, you can’t come back from doing something like that, it marks you, it marks your soul, I can’t -”

Oancitizen turned back and fixed him with a stare. “Seven billion people,” he said, his voice still quiet but accenting every word.

Linkara’s throat burned. Reading the magical words had burned the image into his head, even in the abstract. “Oancitizen, it requires a _human sacrifice_.”

“I know.” Oancitizen closed his eyes again; either he was having an internal moral struggle of his own, or he was exhausted, and Linkara couldn’t tell which. “But unless you have a different miracle up your sleeve, it may be our only hope.”

Linkara crumpled the pages in his hand, stood up without a word, and hurried from the room.

\---

The Critic’s attic was a little too warm to be comfortable, and a thin layer of dust clung to every exposed surface. Linkara sat on the floor with his arms wrapped around his knees, his forehead pressed against well-worn corduroy.

“I can’t,” he whispered. He might not be a perfect hero, but he surely wasn’t a murderer, or at least not a cold-blooded one. This was premeditation of the worst kind. There was no way to justify such a perversion of magic, a reduction of a human life and soul to an object to be used and discarded.

But it would _work_. Reading the spell had stirred up enough of his own personal magic for him to understand the essence of it, and he knew that the ritual worked, had worked multiple times before. This wasn’t some theoretical mage cooking up a spell for a hypothetical threat; this was a wizard - or more probably, a coven, maybe even several covens - writing down something they had actually used, and used successfully.

He could do it. He could save the whole world.

And lose his soul, his own sense of heroism, his deepest self.

Someone banged on the door. “Linkara?” shouted the Critic. “Hey, big hero, what’s the deal? You got cold feet all of a sudden? Come back down and work with us!”

“I’m pondering,” Linkara called back. “Go away. I’ll come down when I’ve got a better idea.”

There was a long, awkward pause before the Critic’s feet plodded back down the staircase. Linkara shuffled the wrinkled printout in his hands and stared at it.

“Why did it have to be a sacrifice?” Linkara whispered. The warm pulse in his inside jacket pocket answered him well enough. That was how magic turned a soul into a weapon, the essence of an individual into an impersonal power source. He’d benefitted from it for a long time, albeit unknowingly for most of it.

He remembered believing for a deluded moment that he’d been responsible for it, and what that had done to him. He remembered the feel of the barrel of the magic gun pressed to his own temple.

Maybe if he went through with this, then she’d be so disgusted with him that she’d let him go through with that the next time.

No. No thoughts like that. He wasn’t doing this, and that was final.

 _Seven billion people,_ Oancitizen’s voice echoed in his head.

Another pair of feet thundered up the staircase. Linkara waited for the knock on the door, but several minutes stretched out until it came. “Hey, Linkara,” Angry Joe’s voice called through the door, “everything okay up here?”

“I’m fine,” Linkara shouted, a little too loud and too hoarse. “I’m thinking, okay? It’s too loud and too crowded down there.”

“You sure, man?” Angry Joe didn’t usually sound this concerned, but Linkara suspected that he’d have absolutely no sympathy for his current crisis.

After all, he was seriously contemplating killing someone for the sake of a spell. Linkara shuddered at the thought. “Yeah, I’m sure,” he answered. “Just give me some think-time, okay?” Then again, Angry Joe was more willing to use violence as a default solution to a problem than he was. Maybe he’d be pragmatic about it.

_Seven billion people._

Linkara resisted the urge to ask, to try to couch the horrific reality of what was written on the crumpled papers as a hypothetical question. What if Angry Joe thought he was a monster for even thinking about it in the abstract?

Worse, what if he didn’t?

“Okay, sure.” The footsteps on the stairs seemed quieter going down than they had coming up.

Linkara lowered his forehead back to his knees and thought about the weight in his jacket pocket. Margaret had been sealed into an object, her life suspended but her existence not ended. It was awful, unforgivable, horrible - but ultimately some good had come of it. She had been an ally to him against so many threats to humanity.

The victim of this spell became a weapon, too. But it was a one-shot kind of deal. The energy of Margaret’s bound soul was parceled out a burst at a time, and he didn’t use her so often that she didn’t have time to recover. This spell turned a soul into a rocket and used up every erg of energy in a single burst; if there was anything left at all, it would be adrift in deep space.

“No,” Linkara whispered. Nothing could justify doing that to another human being. Nothing.

 _All life on the fucking planet,_ Insano’s voice reminded him.

Could he really hold these copied grimoire pages in his hand, know he had a solution with a decent chance of working, and not at least _try_ it, no matter how terrible it was? Could he really abandon the entire world and run to some other star, with only his fellow reviewers and the next nine hundred and fifty or so closest people? Was it any more heroic to leave the rest of the planet he was Champion of to their fate?

Another round of footsteps shuffled up to the door, even quieter, as if they were tiptoeing. More than one person this time, it sounded like. The next noise was less a knock than a hand being laid on the door. “Uh, hey, Linkara,” the Chick said, “we, um, we were going to start talking about Doctor Insano’s backup plan, and, I mean, it’s your ship and all.”

With a heavy sigh, he called back, “Nimue can give you anything you need for specs. She’s programmed to let Angry Joe have medium security access, and I can’t think of anything you’d need a higher level for.” He paused. “Just don’t let Insano talk to her directly, and it should go fine.”

“Right now, Insano’s helping Joe and Sci-Fi Guy work on the blowing-shit-up plan,” called back another, deeper voice. That must be Todd in the Shadows.

Linkara thought of something else, a half-remembered offhand mention in someone else’s review. “Hey, Todd,” he asked, “what’s the range on your space-between-spaces walk, and can you take anyone else with you?”

There was a mumble from another couple of voices, one relatively high, one low. Todd answered, “I’m not sure what my theoretical range is, but the furthest I’ve ever tried is Great Britain, I can’t take anyone or anything I can’t personally touch, and I can’t go anywhere I haven’t at least seen on video.” He paused. “We actually kind of talked about that already, after you left, about me trying to shadow-walk part of the planetoid into the space between and dumping it there, as part of the teleporting-as-much-of-it-away-as-we-could plan.”

“Okay,” Linkara sighed. “So, could you take people into the shadow-space and leave them there?”

“Yeah, I could, technically,” Todd said, “but the probability of me ever _finding_ them again is pretty damn small. That place shifts around a lot.”

“Ugh,” Linkara groaned, “so, at best an emergency evacuation tactic. Sorry to bug you about it.”

“No problem,” Todd answered. “So, uh, you just want Angry Joe to talk to your computer? You’re not coming down? _Oof._ ” He sounded like someone had just elbowed him in the side.

“I need to think,” Linkara said. He tried to sound manly and forceful, but even he could hear the overtone of whininess. “Just - I’ll be down in a few, okay? It’s too loud and too crowded to get any good thinking done down there.”

“Can’t argue with that,” the Chick said, and once again footsteps echoed down the stairs.

As soon as the noise faded away, Linkara leaned back against the wall, letting his weight push the hat down further onto his head and partly over his eyes. This was absolutely unfair; in fact, this was like those impossible ethics tests psychology grad students tortured undergrads with.

Kill one person in cold blood, or let the whole rest of the planet die?

There was a very soft noise at the door, and it opened. Well, that wasn’t all that surprising; the lock wasn’t very good - he could have picked it with a credit card. Linkara closed his eyes. Hopefully, whoever it was would realize he didn’t want to talk right now. 

Someone fairly heavy moved slowly across the room, picking their way between old furniture and piles of once-used props. Whoever it was edged away a cardboard box on the floor and quietly sat down to Linkara’s left.

Linkara carefully didn’t respond. Maybe if he didn’t say anything, whoever it was would just get bored and go away.

No such luck. Still, whoever it was wasn’t trying to get him to talk. They weren’t cajoling him, they weren’t giving him orders or making demands, they weren’t even touching him. Just sitting next to him in the dim attic in silence.

Linkara opened one eye. The Rap Critic was sitting crosslegged on the floor next to him, also leaned against the wall. He was watching him with both eyes open, but his face was remarkably calm. There was no sense of urgency; he was clearly waiting, but waiting patiently.

That was fine. He could wait. Linkara closed his eyes again and listened to his own breathing, and that of the man next to him.

“Are you a Christian?” Linkara blurted. It startled even himself; he hadn’t really intended to say anything.

“More or less,” the Rap Critic replied. “I believe in God, and I think Jesus was pretty cool.” He shifted to look at Linkara more directly; the dim light reflected off of his glasses. “I’m not a fundamentalist, though. I don’t hate gay people, I like women having the same legal and social rights as guys, and I don’t think witches or wizards should be stoned, if that’s what you’re asking about.”

Linkara allowed himself the smallest of chuckles. “Well, I was eventually going to get there. How’d you guess?”

Rap Critic inclined his head slightly. “Well, that looks like what I’d imagine a spell would look like, if I had to guess,” he said, glancing at the crumpled pages at Linkara’s feet. “And I know you’ve got a magic gun, and you’ve cast a spell or two. I don’t watch all your reviews, but I’ve seen a couple.”

Nodding, Linkara went on. “Really, though, I think I was asking - I mean, a lot of our compatriots have, ah, unconventional ideas about morality.”

“Yeah, I’m kind of traditional, at least by comparison,” the Rap Critic agreed. “But some of that might be just because what I review isn’t particularly outlandish. There’s some science fiction in rap, and honestly, I wish there were more, but that’s about it. The rest is straight-up real-world-ish, or at most soap-opera-esque, power fantasies, mostly.” He smiled gently. “If I had to deal with stuff weirder and more horrifying than Insane Clown Posse on a regular basis, I might have a considerably more complicated outlook, too. I mean, Todd has to deal with Lady Gaga, and look at him.”

That made Linkara laugh. “Yeah, maybe so,” he agreed. “I mean, I work in a medium that traditionally deals with black-and-white morality, but it’s hard to say it’s really been that way for the past twenty years. Even in the ‘70s it was starting to show some shades of grey.” His eyes fell to the pages in front of him, and the bubble of mirth died in his throat.

Rap Critic followed his gaze, but said nothing. Apparently he really wasn’t going to push. That was a huge relief; Linkara lapsed back into silence.

It might have been a good five minutes before he spoke again. “I guess you’re wondering what those are,” he said, watching his colleague’s face out of the corner of his eye.

“Yeah, I am,” the Rap Critic admitted. “Especially since they look like they’re just scribbles, and they’re not in any alphabet I know about, but if I see them out of my peripheral vision it looks like the swirls are trying to crawl off the page before I can look back.”

“Huh.” That reaction was new, as far as Linkara knew. Maybe the Rap Critic had a teeny tiny bit of magic of his own. “They’re a spell from a book Oancitizen discovered,” he explained. “It’s ugly stuff, the kind of thing that gave us magic users the reputation that made Christians want to stone us in the first place.”

Rap Critics eyebrows went up at that. “How ugly?” he asked.

Linkara sighed. “Human sacrifice ugly,” he answered.

Rap Critic’s mouth twisted. “So why are you sitting up here reading it?” he wondered aloud. “I mean, with your big hero thing - wait, did someone use the spell to conjure up the asteroid that’s headed towards us?”

Now, that was an interesting idea. Linkara rolled that around in his head. Could an evil nihilist coven somewhere have summoned the planetoid? Probably not - it would be a ridiculously difficult spell, bringing something so large from so far away, when similar and far more controllable results could be had by calling up volcano elementals or demons.

“No,” he admitted, “it’s kind of the opposite of that. It’s a comet-buster spell, but it’s written in such a way that it doesn’t just affect comets.”

“Ooooh.” The Rap Critic nodded slowly. “So, you have something that might save the entire world from the asteroid.”

“If we do it right - and it would have to be a bunch of people, not just me - I’m about 99% certain it’ll work,” Linkara said. He was actually 100% certain the spell worked, but not quite as certain about his ability to cast it perfectly, and explaining that required talking more about the technical aspects of magic than he was sure Rap Critic had time for.

“But to use it, you’d have to use black magic, kill somebody, and then live with the repercussions.”

Linkara nodded; it was a relief that someone else _got_ it. “Yes, exactly.”

Rap Critic nodded back, his eyes half-closed in thought. “Does it have to be someone you kidnap off the street, or a virgin girl, or something like that?”

“No, actually,” Linkara replied, “it has to be either a prisoner of war or a volunteer.”

Rap Critic raised an eyebrow at him. “Where are you gonna get a prisoner of war from? Y’all got one left over from invading Molossia?”

“No, I don’t think we have that option,” Linkara said. “We’d have to find someone to volunteer for it, so add another tough job there before we can even start.”

“Well, from the perspective of someone who wouldn’t be holding the knife, I’d sure like having a world for you to live with the repercussions in,” the Rap Critic admitted, “but man, that’s a seriously tough choice.”

“Thanks for understanding that part, at least,” Linkara mumbled. The conversation was not going the way Linkara would have expected; in particular, he was surprised that the Rap Critic was taking the idea of a murder in stride. Then again, of all the various horrors that showed up in comics and films, bloody murder was probably the most common in rap songs. Still, it was nice for someone to realize that this was a huge dilemma, even if he didn’t share Linkara’s visceral horror. “I just can’t see -”

The door to the stairway swung open abruptly, dumping Film Brain (who had clearly been leaning on it) onto the dusty floor. He yelped, and attempted to scramble to his feet; Linkara and the Rap Critic jumped up to help him up.

Scooping up the film reviewer with an arm under his shoulder, Linkara looked over and asked, “Did you know he was out here?”

“He was already up here when Chick, Todd, and I came up,” the Rap Critic said. “He wasn’t actually listening at the door, though, just sort of hovering out there.”

“I wanted to help,” Film Brain protested as he found his footing again, “but I couldn’t figure out what to say, and you seemed like you didn’t really want to be bothered.”

“I really didn’t,” Linkara agreed. “Are you okay now?”

“Not really,” Film Brain said, wiping his nose on the back of his hand with a sniffle. “There’s still a dwarf planet heading towards the Earth that’s going to wipe out everything. Linkara, if you have something that could help, that even has a chance of saving the planet, you should use it! How could you think of not at least sharing it with the rest of us?”

Linkara guided Film Brain to a rickety-looking chair and sat him in it. “I don’t know how much you heard from out there,” he started.

“Pretty much all of it,” Film Brain replied, “and I realize that it’s asking a lot of you to perform an act of magic you see as irrevocably evil, but surely you’ve got to see it’s for the greater good!”

“It’s not always that easy,” the Rap Critic said before Linkara could answer. “I mean, think about it this way: as far as we know, the asteroid isn’t anyone’s fault. Nobody made it head our way. If it kills us all, it’s a tragedy, but it’s not, you know, immoral.”

“Right,” Linkara continued, “but if I use the spell, then I’m committing _murder_ ; it goes against every code of heroic morals -”

“Fuck your morals,” Film Brain spat; immediately, his eyes filled with remorse. “No, I’m sorry,” he cried, “that’s not what I meant. I mean, obviously we all have our moral codes, and yours are important. But _think_ about it, Linkara. One life, and your moral code, against seven billion humans and trillions of other animals, the whole ecosystem, all the art and culture and literature that’s ever been made -”

“We can save a lot of the art and literature in Comicron-1’s databanks,” Linkara argued, but it sounded weak, even to him. Was he really prioritizing books and movies over people’s lives?

“But not all of it,” Film Brain insisted. “Linkara, you have to at least let everyone know there’s an option. Paw and Sci-Fi Guy and the others are going mad down there over how hopeless it all is.”

Linkara shook his head. “Even if I agreed to cast the spell, we’d need at least ten other people to perform the ritual.” He swallowed; he hated himself already for what he was about to say. “And a victim.”

Film Brain nodded. His gaze fell to his lap, then to a corner, then back to his hands, then finally up to Linkara’s eyes. “I’ll do it,” he said in a voice that was barely a squeak.

Rap Critic’s sharp inhalation was drowned out by Linkara’s own gasp. They glanced at each other, eyes wide. “Say that again?” Linkara asked, wondering if he’d heard that wrong.

“I’ll be the victim, if I have to be,” Film Brain said again, stronger this time. His hands were shaking, but his voice was clear. “I don’t want to, I’ll be perfectly honest, but I’d rather die alone than with the rest of the planet.”

“No! I can’t do that to you! You don’t even know what you’re asking! You don’t need to die,” Linkara said desperately. “You’re welcome on my ship, you have to know that.”

“Linkara, have you _looked_ at everyone down there?” Film Brain demanded. “Just psychologically, do you think we’d all survive the loss of the only planet we’ve ever known? We’re not the people you’d want to repopulate a new colony with! You want geniuses, and people who are capable of working hard from sun-up to sundown, not internet reviewers who’ve never gotten their hands dirty.” He swallowed and looked up into Linkara’s eyes defiantly. “Anyway, I think you need to tell the others. If you don’t, I will.”

Panicked, Linkara glanced over at the Rap Critic. Rap Critic held up his hands. “It’s not mine to tell,” he said, “but first, I kind of agree with Film Brain that everyone else deserves to know, and second, if you want him to not blab, you’re probably going to have to restrain him, and I won’t help.”

Linkara leaned over and banged his head lightly against the wall. “Okay, I’ll tell everyone,” he agreed, “but I’m not agreeing to actually do the ritual yet, okay?” That he had let the word ‘yet’ slip in there was bothersome, but he’d worry about that later.

Film Brain scrambled to his feet. “I’ll get everyone back into the living room,” he said, and scurried down the stairs. Linkara and the Rap Critic followed with far heavier steps.

\---

The crowd of assembled reviewers was a more pathetic sight than Linkara had anticipated. The number of them who had raided the Critic’s liquor cabinet and were now somewhere between comfortably numb and three sheets to the wind was distressing. An equal number had clearly either been crying or having panic attacks. Angry Joe was red-faced, as if he’d been shouting, and his hair looked like he’d been fighting through a hurricane. SciFi Guy and Paw looked exhausted, slumped over their respective laptops as if they’d been working for days instead of hours.

It did not inspire a great deal of confidence. Linkara glanced back at the Rap Critic, who was standing behind him for moral support, then cleared his throat. “I have good news and bad news,” he announced.

“Good news first,” commanded the Critic. He was clutching a nearly empty beer bottle in one hand, but if he’d downed more than the one, it wasn’t showing yet.

Linkara nodded. “All right. Thanks to some research by Oancitizen, I’ve got a spell that might potentially solve the asteroid problem.”

The room dissolved into sudden excited chattering. Obscurus Lupa stood up woozily from her spot on the floor between a bored-looking Phelous and a thoroughly blitzed Cinema Snob, and crawled onto the sofa next to Oancitizen, whispering a question that might have been “Why didn’t you say anything?” Oan shushed her gently as the Critic barked at his assembled reviewers to quiet down.

“The bad news,” Linkara continued, “is that it’s a pretty nasty piece of work otherwise.”

“What does that mean, exactly?” the Chick asked.

Linkara took a deep breath. “First of all, it requires a minimum of eleven people. More would be better.”

“Do they all have to be magic users?” Lupa asked, looking worried. She continued, “Because we’ve got a few people who are one-trick ponies where magic is concerned, but you’re the only real wizardly dude.”

“Actually, we have two,” Linkara corrected, then stopped himself. If Oancitizen hadn’t mentioned it to anyone else, it really wasn’t his place to out him to the group.

Fortunately, Oan realized that at the same time. “I’ve dabbled a bit,” he offered. “That’s how I recognized it as a working spell in the first place. But I’m certainly no expert.”

“And the spell only really requires the leader to be a sorcerer,” Linkara finished. “Everyone else just has to do the dancing and chanting part, and in a few cases draw symbols in the air or hold candles.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” said Sad Panda from the back.

“It’s potentially about half an hour of dancing and chanting,” Linkara pointed out, “and part of the reason for doing it is so the leader can draw enough magic from everyone to power the spell. One person isn’t enough, and drawing from just a couple of people might leave them permanently damaged - remember, spells come from your life force unless you have an artifact that protects you.”

“Like Malachite’s stone,” the Critic remembered aloud. “So, okay, do you have enough people here?”

“More than enough,” Linkara agreed, “but there’s more than that. First of all, this is some seriously dark magic. If you participate in this, you will have a mark on your soul that will never come out.”

“Enh, whatever,” the Critic said, shrugging, and much of the room nodded in agreement. 

Linkara rubbed at the bridge of his nose. That was not an encouraging reaction.

“But why is it dark magic?” Benzaie asked from somewhere behind Sad Panda. “I am not seeing why an asteroid removing spell would be on the demonic side.”

Here was the hard part. Linkara stood up straighter. “Because it requires, as the primary motive force of the spell, a human sacrifice.”

The room went silent. All eyes turned to him, and Linkara’s face burned. Finally, Angry Joe cleared his throat. “Say what?”

“The spell requires that one of the participants be trussed up, painted with magical sigils, stabbed through the heart, and forcibly discorporated,” Linkara went on. He could see Film Brain cringing just off to his left. “The energy from the soul of the sacrificed person is molded into a weapon by the spell, and sent off to disintegrate the comet or asteroid threatening the coven.”

Again, dead silence. It was the Critic who broke it this time. “Did you count the sacrifice as one of the eleven people?”

“Yes, I did,” Linkara groaned. He paused, but no more interruptions were forthcoming. “Now, the best case scenario as I can see it is - I offer to be the sacrifice, and Oancitizen performs the ritual.” He shot a glance across the room, daring Oancitizen to turn him down.

Which he promptly did. “While I appreciate the vote of confidence,” Oancitizen stated, “the technical requirements of the casting of the spell are well beyond my feeble abilities.” His voice grew softer, gentler. “If I could lift this terrible burden from you, Linkara, I would. But I’m not able to.”

Linkara could feel his hands sweating. The Critic stood up, and turned to face him directly. “Will it take any of the - the black mark you were just talking about - off of your shoulders if I directly order you to perform the spell? Wouldn’t that make it my responsibility? I’m pretty sure my soul is shot to shit, anyway.”

“Um, it wouldn’t under the usual rules of war.” Linkara was starting to feel dizzy. Why was no one shouting about how bad an idea this was? Was he really going to have to go through with this?

Film Brain levered himself to his feet. “I volunteer,” he said, his voice breaking. “I’ll be the sacrifice.”

“Perfect!” The Critic smiled and slapped Film Brain on the back. “You’ll be doing me, your country, and the world a tremendous service!”

“I don’t -” Linkara started, then stumbled to a stop. He was pretty sure that he simply wouldn’t be able to go through with it, with Film Brain on the altar; he was too young, too innocent, too unmarked by life. It would be too close to sacrificing a child, even though he knew intellectually that Film Brain wasn’t a kid anymore, that the Rap Critic was actually even younger and he’d just been taking advice from him. But he couldn’t say that, at least not without implicitly also saying that there were people in the room he _could_ do that to, and he still wasn’t sure that was true, either.

A rough voice from the back of the room called out, “Does the sacrifice have to be a virgin?”

Linkara blinked, then consulted the spell. “Um, no,” he answered. “The only requirements are that the sacrifice not be missing any limbs, that they be at least sixteen years of age, and that they either be a volunteer or a fairly captured prisoner of war.”

Phelous disentangled his legs from the Cinema Snob’s and stood up. “I’ll do it, then,” he said, glaring at the Critic. “I’ve had the most practice.”

Enough of the room gasped that Lupa’s tiny shriek was barely audible. Linkara put out both hands, palms forward. “Whoa, there. I appreciate the offer, but please understand what you’re volunteering for, Phelous. The spell turns your soul into a weapon - and it’s a one-use one.” His mouth was suddenly dry; he paused to try and swallow. “You wouldn’t be coming back from this one.”

“I get that,” Phelous drawled. “I haven’t been doing that as much anyway. But,” he paused to look down at a trembling Film Brain, “I’m pretty sure whatever you end up doing to me will be less bad than the kinds of damage I’ve already handled.”

“I already volunteered,” Film Brain protested feebly.

“Yup, you sure did,” Phelous said, “but you’re shaking like a tree in a blizzard.” He crouched down, putting his eye level slightly below Film Brain’s. “You’re scared shitless,” Phelous continued. “Which, you know, I don’t blame you. Dying’s really scary, the first couple of times.”

“Only the first couple?” Film Brain’s eyes went wide.

Phelous smirked. “Yeah, it gets kind of boring after a while, honestly.” He stood up again, and continued, “And this one would be new-ish, anyway. I haven’t ever been a voluntary ritual sacrifice before.”

“That’s not a good reason,” Linkara whispered, over the part of his brain that was pointing out that killing Phelous would be potentially a little easier than killing Film Brain - at least he didn’t look helpless and innocent.

“Sure it is,” Phelous answered, “but if you need a better one - think of all the other times I’ve died as rehearsals, to make sure we get this one right.” He glanced at Lupa on the couch and the Snob on the floor and mouthed something Linkara didn’t catch, then looked back up at Linkara and the Critic. “I’m sure. And I’m ready. And I’m not afraid.”

Film Brain looked outraged. “You’ve got at least one person who cares about you!” he shouted. “Maybe two, I’m not sure about that, but at least one. Who have I got?”

Phelous shook his head. “Are you really upset that someone else is offering to die in your place?” he said, disbelieving.

“Well . . . no . . . I just . . . .” Film Brain’s voice trailed off, and he collapsed into the chair behind him, sobbing in relief.

“Well, that’s decided then,” the Critic declared with a smile. “Linkara’s our dark sorcerer for the evening, Phelous will be playing the part of the sacrifice, and the rest of us will be the ominous chorus. Anyone have anything else?”

Angry Joe cleared his throat. “I appreciate that you guys are on this,” he said, “but I think I trust in lasers and missiles more than ancient spells. I’m going to head back to the satellite and see if I can blast the shit out of it from up there.” He made eye contact with Linkara, then looked away. “Who knows, maybe the combined approach will kick its ass,” he mumbled.

Linkara’s face burned. Angry Joe wasn’t blaming him, exactly, he could see that, but being part of a dark spell was too much to ask of him. He wondered if he’d ever look him in the eye again, afterwards.

“Fine, dismissed,” the Critic said, waving his hand. “Linkara, what supplies will we need?”

Linkara’s eyes ran down the now rather battered pages. “Candles, preferably white ones, ideally the ones in the tall jars so they won’t burn out if the breeze comes up. About four dozen, plus four colored ones, yellow, red, blue, and green. Enough white taper candles for everyone participating, except me. Flour and red ink for drawing sigils. Ah, I’d just as soon not use my own dagger, so we should probably pick up a good, sharp hunting knife.” He looked up at Phelous, who now had one arm around Lupa and the other around the Cinema Snob, both of whom were staring at Phelous with a blend of emotions Linkara couldn’t parse. “Some lumber and cinderblocks to set up an altar. Someone’s going to need to drum, and I don’t have one.”

“Does it have to be a real drum?” Todd asked over Oancitizen’s shoulder. He’d been staring at Lupa, or at least in her direction; the mask made it a little hard to tell.

“It has to keep a steady beat for almost the whole ritual, but no, there’s nothing here about what it needs to be made of,” Linkara answered.

“I can set my keyboard to the percussion settings,” Todd offered.

Linkara couldn’t think of any reason why that wouldn’t work. He glanced down at Oan, who shrugged. “Yeah, that ought to be okay,” Linkara agreed. “We’ll also need incense, an incense burner and charcoal, sea salt, and a bowl of water.”

“I have bottled water and a nice cut-glass bowl we can use,” the Critic said, heading towards the kitchen.

The Cinema Snob and Lupa, apparently having reached some sort of detente with Phelous, stepped forward and blocked the Critic. “How long is getting everything ready going to take?” the Snob demanded. He had sobered up remarkably quickly.

The Critic looked at Linkara, who stared back, palms up in a half-shrug. Oancitizen stood up and cleared his throat. “If we know where everything we need can be purchased,” he said, “I would imagine procuring the supplies will take at least an hour, probably more.”

“I can tell you where to find everything, as long as you don’t mind getting Catholic incense instead of witchy stuff,” the Critic assured them. “We can even take my car.”

“Two hours,” Lupa blurted. Cinema Snob nodded, and unpacked that. “We want two hours with Phelous to say goodbye. Ideally, in relative privacy, although if we can’t have that we’re happy to just shock the hell out of everyone.”

The Critic checked his phone. “That would put us starting set-up at about five PM. That’s twelve hours to impact, right? Is that enough time?”

“It should be plenty of time,” Linkara answered. “The ritual should only take about half an hour to set up and half an hour to perform. Maybe another hour of practicing the chants and everything.”

“Then sure, feel free to use the guest bedroom,” the Critic agreed.

Lupa sidled up to Oancitizen and murmured a question Linkara still didn’t catch. Oan smiled at her gently. “No, that should be fine,” he replied in a low voice. “There weren’t any specific ritual purity requirements.” Lupa hugged him for a moment, glared at Linkara, and grabbed Phelous’s hand as the Snob led them down the hallway.

“I didn’t realize they were a triad,” Linkara mumbled in the direction they’d left.

“It’s relatively new,” Oancitizen said. “But they’ve seemed quite happy. Lupa’s been happier than I’ve seen her in years.”

“And I’m going to end that for her,” Linkara groaned. “Just another mark on my soul.”

“You are literally going to save every life on the planet,” Oan pointed out. “That has to count for something.”

“ _We_ are going to save every life on the planet, except Phelous’s,” Linkara corrected him. “I can’t do this alone.”

“And you won’t have to,” Oan, the Rap Critic, Film Brain, and the Critic said in near-synchrony. The Critic continued, “Let’s go. I may have to borrow gas money from one of you; I’m a little low in both the tank and the bank at the moment.”

\---

As the Critic’s car pulled up into the driveway, Paw, Todd in the Shadows, and the Rap Critic hustled out of the front door to meet them. “The asteroid has shown up on NASA’s telescopes,” Paw told them as Oancitizen passed him a bag full of seven-day candles. “It’s breaking on the cable news channels right now.”

“We know,” the Critic snapped. “It came on one of the AM news radio stations just after we got to Saint Vinnie’s Catholic Supply Shop and Vestment Repair. It’s a real pain to have to ask people if they can give you a discount for bulk when they’re sobbing and counting a rosary.”

“Although we did get a remarkably good deal on the candles,” Oancitizen noted as he gathered up the package from the hunting supply store.

Linkara handed the Rap Critic another bag of candles, white tapers this time, and then began loading Todd’s arms up with four long planks of lumber that had been strapped to the top of the car. “I can’t believe you guys wanted to haggle over the end of the world,” he grumbled.

“That’s the whole point of all of this,” the Rap Critic said, shifting his burden and helping Todd balance his. “There’s not going to be an end of the world. We’re canceling the apocalypse!”

Todd groaned. “You’ve just been waiting for an opportunity to say that, haven’t you?”

“Can you blame me?” The Rap Critic’s grin was infectious, despite the sense of impending doom; Linkara and the Nostalgia Critic ducked their heads to hide smiles of their own.

The six of them trudged to the back yard, where Film Brain had been clearing the lawn furniture while the Nostalgia Chick and Nella made a quick run with a push-mower and a weed-whacker. Paw and the Rap Critic began unloading the candles onto a slightly rickety plastic picnic table. 

Todd shifted his grip on the planks under his arm, grunting, “Where do these go?”

“You said you had some cinderblocks back here?” Oancitizen asked the Critic. 

Linkara’s stomach lurched, the last vestige of the Rap Critic’s mirth fleeing him. This was becoming all too real, too quickly.

“Over against the fence, where the dead rose bush is,” the Critic replied, setting down the bag with the incense and censer and pointing. “There should be about twenty all together, unless Ask That Guy broke one of them dropping it on someone.”

Oan looked at Linkara expectantly. “Does the altar need to be in the center of the circle, in the north quadrant, or in the east quadrant?”

“Center,” Linkara answered. He’d nearly memorized the logistics of the entire spell by now, having read the ingredients list over and over in the car on the way out, and the layout over and over on the way back. It was something to concentrate on other than the mechanics of casting it, especially the climax.

The Rap Critic and Paw dislodged the heavy concrete blocks from their current position half-buried in the grass and dragged them to the center of the circle. After conferring briefly with Oancitizen, they set up three pillars about a yard apart and then laid the planks over them, forming a makeshift table about two feet wide and seven feet long.

“Will that work?” Oan asked Linkara as they nudged the last piece of lumber into place.

“Sure, it looks fine,” Linkara said, still trying not to think too hard about it.

Oan swallowed and glanced aside at the Critic, who was nervously pressing his hands against the planks to check their stability. “Perhaps you should try it out,” he said.

Linkara rubbed his hand down his face. Oan was right, of course, but he really didn’t think he had the intestinal fortitude to begin swinging the knife around just yet. He settled for walking over to the altar and miming bringing his hands down. “It’s a little low,” he admitted, “but I think it’s fine.”

“It’ll feel higher when Phelous is actually OUCH!” said the Critic, as the Chick stepped heavily on his foot and shook her head at him with a look of pure disgust. Todd and the Rap Critic grumbled something about keeping him in line, then began hammering a pair of cross-pieces into place to keep the longer boards from sliding around.

Linkara grabbed a bag of the seven-day candles. “Go round everyone up,” he instructed Paw and Film Brain. “At least, everyone who’s going to be in the chorus. We need to get the blocking straight, so I don’t have to give people instructions once we start.” As they rushed off, he began setting up a ring of the white candles with the largest diameter the yard would allow. Oancitizen grabbed the next bag and began setting up a smaller ring around the altar itself.

\---

By the time Paw had shooed 8-Bit Mickey into the back yard, the clouds that had obscured the sky all day had started to break up, allowing occasional beams of golden late-afternoon sunlight to illuminate the tableau. Thanks mostly to Oancitizen’s practiced eye, it looked properly occult even without the sigils laid out yet.

Oancitizen had changed into a black robe that made him look a little like a Franciscan monk; when asked where that had come from, he had mumbled something about cosplaying and Oliver Reed. Linkara hadn’t brought any sort of ritual attire with him, not that he really had much; one of their purchases at the church supply store still in its bag was a black polyester choir robe. He thought it made him look more like a Lutheran minister than anything else, but it was better than nothing, which was the literal other option. No one but the Critic had been enthusiastic about trying to cast the spell skyclad.

“Okay,” Linkara addressed the gathered crowd, “This is going to require everyone to play certain roles. Some of them are more involved than others, so it shouldn’t be necessary for anyone to take a role that’s more complex than they’re comfortable with.”

“Except you,” murmured someone in the middle of the crowd, not unkindly.

Linkara acknowledged the statement with a nod and a shrug. There wasn’t anything anyone could do about it at this point, including himself; the inevitability had sunk in right around when he had used a file borrowed from the Chick to scratch his personal monogram into the shiny new hunting knife they were going to use as the sacrificial dagger. “I’ll be leading the ritual,” he continued, “and depending on how it goes, it may look like I’m not all the way here, kind of out of it, after a certain point. Don’t worry, though - that’s normal, or at least as normal as this stuff ever gets.”

He turned toward Oancitizen and gestured. “I’ll need two people with me in the inner circle, to handle some of the tools and to sort of hold the magic if, um, if I get too deep.” Explaining this to people who had no idea how it worked was more difficult than Linkara had expected. “Oancitizen has already volunteered to be my Man In Black, which is one of those two positions, since he knows at least a little bit about how all this works.”

“I _know_ a fair amount, from a purely theoretical perspective,” Oan corrected automatically. “I’m tragically short on talent and direct experience.”

“But you’ve done the research, and that’s at least worth something,” Linkara finished. “The other helper is the Maiden, and it will work better if it’s a woman, or at least someone presenting as such. Do any of you ladies have any experience with this sort of thing?”

After a pause, Maven of the Eventide hesitantly raised a hand. “I’ve cast a couple of candle spells?” she said, a bit unsure of herself.

No other hands went up. Linkara nodded, “Sure, okay, that’ll do.” In point of fact, it probably didn’t really count, but he needed a Maiden and he couldn’t afford to be picky at this point.

“Do I actually have to be a maiden?” she asked, her hand still in the air. Paw cleared his throat and appeared to discover something fascinating on the boards of the fence.

“No, that’s just the title,” Linkara assured her, and her expression brightened. “Now, I also need a drummer, but since we don’t have a drum, Todd has offered to use his keyboards for that.” He pointed to a flat spot on the lawn that was just inside the large ring of candles. “He’ll be set up right there.”

“Right,” said Todd, unfolding an x-shaped metal stand and testing it to make sure it was stable.

“I also need four people to hold the quarters of the outer circle,” Linkara went on, pointing at the four brightly colored candles set in the large ring of white ones. “You won’t be dancing during the part that requires that, but you’ll be leading the chant, so I need four people with strong voices that can carry over a whole quarter of the circle.”

Rap Critic raised one hand. “I can do that, no problem.”

The Chick’s hand was also up. “Put me where you need me,” she stated.

Linkara nodded. “Okay, great.” He glanced around the crowd. “How about you, Critic? You have a pretty good voice, and it’s your house - you should have an official position.”

“Sure, fine,” said the Critic, looking nervous. There was something just a bit comforting for Linkara about his boss’s discomfort; at least it wasn’t just him.

“Great,” Linkara assured him. “We need one more. Paw, how about you?”

“I’m not all that great at projection,” Paw said, “but sure, I’ll give it a try.”

“I’ll do it,” interrupted a firm baritone from the back. The assembled reviewers turned around, then hastily opened an aisle for the Cinema Snob, who strode forward with his chin held defiantly high.

Linkara’s mouth dropped open; he closed it hastily. “Snob? Are you sure?” he asked.

“I’m as sure about it as any of you assholes are sure about any fucking thing,” the Snob spat. “If my - if someone I - if Phelous can have the fucking balls to offer to die for real for this, than I can at least be here for him and the goddamned fucking world.”

Linkara met the shorter reviewer’s ferocious gaze. Somewhere behind him, Critic fell on the grenade, and asked, “You wouldn’t be asking to do this in order to screw up the ritual and save him, would you?”

The noise that came from Snob’s throat was less a word than an animalistic cry of rage; he came at the Critic swinging. Oancitizen got to him before Linkara did. “Stop it,” Oan said, grabbing the Snob by the shoulders. “We trust you. We do. But someone had to ask.”

“I’m no Boy Scout,” the Snob snarled, “but I’ve got a little more honor than that, I’d like to fucking think.”

Linkara muttered the words to a simple spell under his breath, then walked around Oan and stared directly into the Snob’s eyes. There was fury there, and under it a grief that threatened to break Linkara’s heart just looking at it, but there was no deceit.

“He’s telling the truth,” Linkara said, more to the Critic than to the crowd. “I’d be honored to have him hold a corner for me.”

The Snob relaxed in Oancitizen’s grip; his head fell forward onto his taller counterpart’s shoulder, and he shuddered. Oan looked bewildered for a minute, then shifted his grip into a kindly hug as he guided the Snob back to the patio, where Lupa and Phelous now stood.

“He can have my spot,” Paw said with some relief. “I’m happy just to be part of the chorus.”

“Actually,” Linkara answered as an idea struck him, “if you’re not going to be holding a quarter, I’d like for you and Sci-Fi Guy to stay hooked into the data from Nimue. Someone in the circle will need to know approximately where the asteroid is, relative to us. Sci-Fi Guy, can you be just outside the circle with those readings coming in, and then feed them to Paw’s headphones inside the circle?”

“Shouldn’t be too hard,” Sci-Fi Guy agreed, and Paw nodded.

Linkara glanced down at the page of notes he’d scrawled for himself. “Okay, everyone else who’s participating, here’s what you’ll be doing. Either Oan or I will have the incense burner as you come in, and we’ll blow some incense smoke over you.”  He pointed at the brass censer on the altar.  “You’ll light a candle for yourself as you walk in, and then I’ll do some stuff that will keep all the magical energy we raise inside the circle. The four of you at the quarters will each have a speaking part for that; you can either memorize it or read it off a notecard, either should be fine. We’ll do some stuff in the inner circle, and then -” Linkara’s throat suddenly went dry again. Why did that keep happening? “Then Phelous and I have some lines just between the two of us, and he’ll agree to - to be the sacrifice for the ritual. We’ll put him on the altar and tie his hands and feet - that’s really just symbolic, we don’t have to actually tie you down -”

“We’re going to do this right, for once,” Phelous said calmly. “You guys can tie me up however it works best.”

“Sure,” Linkara replied, trying to force down the voice in the back of his head that was screaming about how wrong this was. “Then I start marking him with the sigils that declare the intent of the spell, the Man In Black and the Maiden light the interior ring of candles, and everyone starts chanting.” A drop of sweat ran down the back of Linkara’s neck, despite the mildness of the weather. “While you’re chanting, everyone but the four people in the corners will start dancing in a circle, clockwise. It’s a really simple dance,” he went on before anyone could object. “You’ll put out your candles and set them between the ones in the glass jars in the outer ring, and everyone will join hands. Then you’ll step sideways with your left foot, then cross over in front of it with your right foot. It’s just those same two steps, over and over.”

Linkara reached out and grabbed Oancitizen’s hand on his left, and the Critic’s on his right. They demonstrated - side, cross, side, cross, side, cross, until they were almost out of the circle.

MarzGurl’s eyes lit up. “It’s the first two steps of a grapevine,” she realized.

“It’s exactly a grapevine, except all the crosses are in front,” Oancitizen said; it wasn’t clear if he was agreeing with her or correcting her.

The assembled reviewers attempted the steps, some with more success than others. In short order 8-Bit Mickey, MarzGurl, Suede, Benzaie, and Nella had formed a small ring and were spinning flawlessly. Paw and Sage watched them with arched eyebrows. Film Brain had managed to trip over his own feet and was on the ground again. Sci-Fi Guy and Todd exchanged a look that managed to communicate how grateful they were that they weren’t going to have to even try it.

“So everyone will just keep doing that, to the beat, while they’re singing the chant,” Linkara continued. “While you’re doing that, you’ll probably feel something strange going on, because I’ll be gathering up all the magical energy we need to, um, to finish the spell. It may even hurt,” he admitted. “Performing magic requires spending some of your own life energy.”

“It never seems to hurt you,” Suede objected.

“Well, I use a lot of magic items,” Linkara explained. “The gun is magical in its own right; I don’t have to spend my own life force to use it.” _Because someone else’s is in it_ , he thought but did not say. “Same thing for Angry Joe and his jacket, at least as far as I can tell. And then the hat protects me from a lot of the bad effects of using too much magic too fast. But I can’t power the whole spell; that’s why it needs a coven in the first place.”

“And how does the chant go?” Film Brain asked, picking himself up off the grass.

“Well, I won’t be singing it, except for the first round - I’ll be reciting the rest of the spell,” Linkara said, “so I’ll let the people who are leading the singing demonstrate.”

“Oh, that’s why you were making us practice in the car,” grumbled the Critic. Oancitizen glanced across at him, shrugged, and inhaled; the Critic managed to get a lungful of air in time for them to begin together:

“ _Mors desuper,_  
_Ad astra ab opere,_  
_Per sanguinem fratris_  
_Tutus est terra._ ”

The tune was very simple, only three notes on the first and third lines (which were identical) and four on the second and fourth (which were similar but not quite exactly the same). It sounded vaguely Gregorian; Oancitizen’s monk’s robe didn’t hurt the resemblance at all. Todd finished plugging in his keyboard, set it to a pipe organ voice, and picked out the tune with one hand. By Oan and the Critic’s third repetition, Rap Critic, Paw, the Snob, the Chick, and Maven were singing along; by the fifth, the entire crowd was at least mouthing it. Linkara let them repeat it a few more times, then caught the Critic’s eye; he gestured sharply, and they all fell silent again.

“So yeah, the four quarter-guardians will stay still and sing, Todd will be playing a beat for that - not the organ, although that sounded pretty cool -” Linkara started.

“Yeah, sorry, I just thought it would help keep everyone on key for the first few tries,” Todd apologized, and began fiddling with the settings.

“No problem,” Linkara assured him. “Everyone else will dance in a circle, and keep doing it until - until the spell’s done.”

“And how will we know that?” Sad Panda asked.

Phelous turned and stared at him. “I’ll signal you,” he said dryly; Sad Panda shrank under his baleful gaze.

An image of the knife in his hands, covered in blood, flashed through Linkara’s mind. He shook his head to clear it, so hard his glasses nearly flew off. “Actually, could we have everyone take their places?” he asked quickly. “Let’s get the blocking down before I start drawing symbols all over the grass.”

“Does it matter which quarter our corners take?” Oancitizen asked as Film Brain shooed the mass of reviewers back onto the patio.

“It will once we assign parts,” Linkara realized. “Oh, crud, they’re all Air, aren’t they? I kind of screwed that up.”

“Well, Rap Critic’s the most down-to-Earth and he has the loudest voice, so let’s put him in the north quarter,” Oan suggested. “What direction will you be facing?”

“I don’t know; I’m going to have to make several circles.” Linkara ran through the required gestures in his mind’s eye. “Probably north, by the end?”

“Then Cinema Snob in the south, behind you, so he won’t have to look you in the face; he’ll make a good Fire, anyway. That leaves Critic and Chick opposite each other; classic masculine-feminine polarity, so Critic in the east for Air and Chick in the west for Water.” Oancitizen paused, pondering something. “Did we forget a chalice?”

“The Maiden has a bowl of water that she uses for asperging the coven,” Linkara said, trying not to think about the Snob’s eyes boring into his back. “It’ll go on one corner of the altar and then stay there for the rest of the ritual.”

“So, no rebirth symbolism at all.” Oancitizen blinked, and his lower lip trembled; for a moment, his eyes were wide and wet. Then the moment passed, and his professorial facade was back in place. “All right,” he called, “the three of us - come stand over here, Maven - will be here, and we’ll each be doing something as you walk in. Quarters first - Nostalgia Critic, then Rap Critic, then Nostalgia Chick, then Cinema Snob last. Everyone else wait until they’ve found their candles - the colored ones, Snob, I don’t remember if you were here for that part - right, then everyone else, and fill in the spaces between them. Ah, Phelous, you’ll be last, and you do join the circle with everyone else until our coven leader calls you forward.”

The reviewers practiced walking into the circle, which took three tries to get right without anyone accidentally walking across the circle the wrong way, tripping over anyone else, or knocking over the candles in the outer ring. By the third try, Todd had worked out a simple beat, which actually did improve everyone’s marching. Oancitizen talked Maven through where the bowl and censer went, and Linkara walked the outer perimeter, cuing the quarters when they would speak. Then he turned and faced Phelous.

“Um, at this point I ask you several questions,” Linkara said quietly, looking up into Phelous’s face and not quite meeting his eyes. “You can answer them in your own words, but you have to actually say ‘yes’ to each one. ‘Sure’ or ‘I guess’ won’t cut it, and the magic can tell if you’re sarcastic or sincere.”

“I can do that,” Phelous answered equally quietly. “I don’t have to be sarcastic one hundred percent of the time, you know.”

Linkara’s cheeks burned red, and he turned away as he murmured, “Then you’ll walk with me back to the altar.”

Phelous followed him and looked at the assembled planks dubiously. “Do I lie down on it, or sit on it, or what?”

“You’ll lie down, and then Oan and Maven will tie you down,” Linkara mumbled.

Maven looked around as Phelous settled onto the boards and crossed his arms over his chest. “Where are the ropes?” she asked.

The Critic smacked himself in the forehead. “Of course, they’re still in the bedroom! Should I go get them now, or -” 

“Let’s wait until we’ve got the blocking down,” Linkara said, shaking his head. “Okay, now I paint some symbols on your chest in red ink, and I’m going to be mumbling a lot while I’m doing it. If my eyes look funny, don’t worry, that’s just a side effect.”

“And while he’s doing that,” Oan addressed the outer ring, “Maven and I will be lighting these candles here, and you’ll all start dancing and chanting. Let’s go ahead and try that part. Todd, have you got a beat for us?”

He did; Todd started with a very simple heartbeat rhythm on a setting that sounded like an ashiko drum. Oan swayed in place for a moment, then raised his hand; he and the four quarters started almost in synchrony. The other reviewers hesitantly joined hands and began circling, their voices rising and falling as they navigated around the occasional dips and bumps in the yard. Todd began playing with the beat a bit, adding a counter-rhythm with his other hand.

Linkara closed his eyes and let his mind drift on the chant for a moment. He could feel he life energies of his fellow reviewers swirling around him; even without the formal framework of the ritual proper, some of the aspects of the spell were already beginning to work. Once they started this in earnest, he was going to have to be very careful; it would be entirely too easy to let all that energy overwhelm him.

He turned to face the altar and opened his eyes, intending to work out exactly how long the next stage was going to take. To his surprise, he realized that Phelous was chanting quietly along with everyone else, in his rough but mostly on-key voice.

Except, he’d made a minor alteration in the lyrics.

 _Per sanguinem meum_ , he was singing.

Linkara felt the blood drain from his own face; he wheeled around and fled into the house before he could pass out.

\---

“Okay, that was a lot better.” Rap Critic’s voice drifted up the stairs, followed by a general murmur of agreement. “Basically, as long as you hold the long note and stay in time with the beat, don’t worry too much about the melody; just follow what I and the other quarters are doing. If you can’t hear one of us, listen for Oan or Paw.”

“Singing and dancing at the same time is hard,” whined a male voice. Linkara couldn’t tell who it was, although it wasn’t Film Brain or one of the Frenchmen.

He sighed and leaned back against the attic wall again. This time, there was no abstract argument about morals or ethics or heroism going through his head, no purity qualms about using the wrong kind of magic or getting marked as a dark sorcerer. This time the problem was much more immediate and visceral.

“I can’t do it,” Linkara whispered to a box of props set on a broken chair.

He’d looked into Phelous’s face, and known for sure that he couldn’t. He could not bring down the sacrificial dagger into his friend’s chest. Even accepting, for the moment, the obvious utilitarian argument that one man’s life and another man’s soul and sanity were clearly a reasonable sacrifice to save seven billion people and an entire planet’s ecosystem; even acknowledging that the huge moral difference between “murdered in cold, premeditated blood by someone who dares to call himself a hero” and “killed by a falling asteroid” paled beside the sheer number of lives, human and otherwise, involved - he couldn’t do it. He fundamentally lacked whatever ruthlessness, or courage, or callousness, or warrior spirit was required to kill someone helpless and blameless, much less someone whose fundamental welfare he cared about.

The balance of the voices from below shifted. “Well, someone needs to go up there and get him back down here! The fate of the world, not to mention my network, is at risk!”

“I don’t think I can pull off the same miracle twice, and Todd and Paw can’t run rehearsal by themselves.”

“Rehearsing isn’t going to matter if we don’t have our head wizard! You go up there!”

“I seriously doubt my presence is going to make him feel any better.”

“Sure it will! Your professorial demeanor makes everyone feel better! Just talk about Shakespeare or something.”

“ ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’ isn’t going to improve anyone’s mood. More to the point, if it weren’t for something I happened to stumble across while researching an entirely fictional interplanetary collision, he wouldn’t be in the dilemma he currently stands in the vice of. Worse, if I were only slightly more competent at this particular area of expertise, if my own purely academic study could be translated into working experience, he again would not be between this particular Scylla and Charybdis, because _I_ would be up in your attic pondering my own cowardice, and _he_ would most likely be locked in your bathroom washing ibuprofen down with cheap liquor in an attempt to dull immanent mortal pain.”

“There you go! You understand exactly what he’s going through! Go talk to him.”

“I understand perfectly, because I would be doing the exact same thing in his place, and I have no idea what words of wisdom and courage would draw me down. I’m not sure the task would be possible, to be frank, and if it were, it would be couched in terms of duty and my own ultimate insignificance. I don’t think the effect would be the same on him.”

Linkara nodded despite himself. He’d run down that train of thought already, but it was hard to convince himself he was that insignificant when he was so far two for two at defeating cosmic horrors.

“Well, someone’s got to get him down here!”

“You’re his boss; you go talk to him.”

“The last time I tried to give a motivational speech someone _died_!” 

There was the sound of a door. “And someone’s dying this time, too, but we already know that. This bourbon is terrible, by the way.”

“Yeah, I know, the good liquor store still won’t let me back in after that time with the rabbit. Are you okay?”

“I’d be doing better if I could find some decent painkillers. I remember the last time I got stabbed in the heart, and it was pretty painful. Why is everyone shouting?”

“Our erstwhile ritual leader has locked himself in the attic again.”

The voices stopped for a long pause. “I’ll go see what I can do.”

“Um, are you sure that’s a good idea? I mean, he was looking right at you when he freaked out.”

“That’s why I wanna go talk to him.”

Large feet trod heavily up the stairs. Linkara stared resolutely at his shoes as Phelous pushed the door open and ambled over to sit next to him.

Phelous cleared his throat. “So,” he mumbled, “you wanna talk about it?”

“No,” Linkara replied. Apparently his mouth had other ideas. “I can’t do it, I don’t know why I thought I could do it, this isn’t happening, how is this happening, none of this makes sense, why is this happening?” He managed to get his voicebox under control before he started shrieking.

Phelous sighed, “Look. I know no one is thrilled about this, all right? Least of all me, you know. Dying’s not even fun when you know for sure you’ll be back before you miss dinner. It fucking _hurts_.” He shifted uncomfortably on the floor.

“I don’t want to hurt you.” Linkara’s eyes stung. Oh, no, that was not an option. He was not about to cry, and certainly not in front of Phelous.

“I get that,” Phelous acknowledged, “and if I could see any way out of this, I’d take it too.” He paused, turning to face Linkara. “But I don’t. And I totally get that you think your soul is all better than mine, that you’d do a better job as a sacrifice, but really, fuck you if you think mine’s not good enough.”

Linkara recoiled at that, like the words were a scorpion; certainly they stung as hard. “What?” he shrieked. “No, no, oh, God, no, that’s not - I would never - I don’t think that at all!”

Phelous gave him a sidelong glance. “Really?” he said, drawing the word out. “Because that’s what you’re acting like. You look at me like you’re embarrassed not to have something better on the altar.”

Linkara tried to correct him, to defend himself, to reassure Phelous that it hadn’t even occurred to him to question the relative quality of their souls. The words collided in his throat; what came out was a froglike croak, and then a sob. He felt the first tear spill down his cheek, and ducked his head to his knees, mortified.

“Oh, shit, don’t cry,” Phelous blurted, looking away. “Crap! That was not the reaction I was expecting.”

Frantically, Linkara fought to pull himself back together. He forced himself to breathe slowly, until he thought he had his lungs back under control, even if his eyes were still wet. “It has nothing to do with whether you’re good enough,” he rasped. “If I thought you weren’t, I’d’ve said something when you first volunteered. It has to do with whether I’m strong enough to do this, and I’m not.”

“Strong enough?” echoed Phelous, looking puzzled.

“I’ve never killed anyone,” Linkara said. “At least, not up close and personal. I always played like it was because I’m a hero, but it looks like it’s really because I just don’t have the guts.”

“Oh.” Phelous’s eyes dropped to Linkara’s hands; he seemed to study them for a moment. “You carry a gun, and I know you use it,” he continued in a lower voice. “I always figured that part was no big deal.”

“I can set it on stun,” Linkara explained. “That’s pretty much the default. If I’m shooting to kill, it’s usually someone undead, or extradimensional monsters. Not people. Certainly not people I know.”

Phelous nodded. “I don’t suppose it would help to think of me as undead,” he offered. “I’m pretty sure I qualify by some of the standard definitions.”

“No.” Linkara looked up at him. “From a magical perspective, you’re actually sort of the opposite of undead. You have more life energy than most people, not less.”

“Hah. Good to know.” Phelous glanced over at a dusty mirror across the attic; for a moment he looked sadder than Linkara had ever seen him. “I’m not afraid to die for real,” he said, not meeting Linkara’s gaze. “I’m not looking forward to the pain, but I’m not scared. And I’ve seen the afterlife, or at least the first part of it, and it’s pretty boring, so if the spell really does use up my soul, I’m not worried that I’m missing much there. There are things that I regret not doing, and not seeing, but if the asteroid hits, I won’t get to do most of them anyway, even if we all run away in your ship. I think I managed to fit everything I might have needed to say in those couple of hours when you were out getting supplies.” He hesitated, then stumbled onward, “We gotta do this. It sucks and I’m sorry and I wish you didn’t have to and I wish I didn’t have to, but we gotta save this stupid excuse for a planet, and if that means you stick a knife between my ribs and put me out of my misery, then that’s what happens.”

Linkara shuddered. “What if I screw it up?” he whispered. “What if I go through with it and it doesn’t work?”

 _What if you find out you like it?_ whispered the darkest voice in his head, raspy and faintly metallic.

“Then either you get hit by the asteroid a few hours later and it doesn’t fucking matter, or you pile as many people as you can on your starship and zoom away on Linkara’s Ark, and my corpse gets struck by the asteroid and is exactly as dead as it would have been otherwise,” Phelous explained patiently. He hesitated. “And if you fuck it up badly enough, enough to screw up the spell, I figure there’s a fairly good chance I’ll be back shortly, as usual.”

That last part hadn’t occurred to Linkara. “That’s actually a good point,” he agreed. Somehow, that actually did make him feel better about it. Not good, not by a long shot, but a little better.

“So, prove to me that you don’t think I’m a second-rate sacrifice,” Phelous said, pushing himself to his feet. “If you believe I’m good enough, show me. You’ve got the rest of your life to have horrible crippling regrets; let’s make sure you have a world to do it on.”

“Your honesty is distressing but comforting,” Linkara replied, letting Phelous help him to his feet. 

Could he go through with it? He still wasn’t sure. But he owed it to everyone to try, didn’t he? After all, he’d brought them this far, and Phelous’s fatalistic courage made him feel like it might at least be possible.

As they turned to head downstairs, Linkara reached into his jacket pocket and removed the magic gun. Whatever happened, there was no need to subject Margaret to this; utilitarian motives or not, it would remind her of her worst day, and he didn’t want that. Carefully, he wrapped her in a piece of canvas and hid the gun under a box. He started to stand and follow Phelous, then plucked the trilby from his head, contemplated it for a moment, and tossed it onto a dusty hatrack in the corner before heading downstairs.

\---

Linkara glanced at the ground. A ring of white sigils now filled most of the space between the outer circle of candles and the inner one, making it look much more like a ritual space. The flour would get kicked around over the course of the spell, probably, but that couldn’t be helped. As long as everyone was careful before the dancing started, what happened to the symbols after that wouldn’t matter very much. He turned his attention to other preparations.

“Stupid charcoal doesn’t want to light,” Linkara muttered at the censer. “Only the left side is actually glowing.”

“Just keep all the incense on that side,” Maven suggested. “You shouldn’t need that much, anyway; not like a real lord of the night would.”

Oancitizen tested the butane match and began lighting the candles around the outer ring. “Do you want me to try to get the other side started, or are you okay for right now?” he asked.

Linkara puffed out his cheeks and blew on the charcoal; he was rewarded with a fresh shower of orange sparks. “I think it might have caught this time,” he said, flicking a bit of ash off of the polyester choir gown he was wearing. Oan’s cotton robe was looking better and better.

Todd stuck his head out of the patio door. “About how much longer?” he asked. “We got a couple of people who need to take a leak.”

“Tell them to hurry,” Linkara replied. To Maven, he continued, “Do we have everything on the list?”

“I checked it all, twice,” she huffed.

“Did we ever get the ropes from the Critic’s bedroom?” Oan asked from the far side of the circle, one eyebrow canted.

“They’re under the altar with the spare bottle of ink and some extra candles,” she answered. “Does this outfit look properly witchy?”

Linkara almost answered without looking, but he caught himself in time. He turned around and conspicuously considered her lace-trimmed black broomstick skirt and peasant blouse, topped with a tightly laced purple brocade bodice. She’d tied her hair back with a matching purple velvet ribbon. “You look great,” he said, hoping he sounded reassuring. “Really into the role.”

Oan moved the four remaining unlit glass-jar candles to the side, leaving a small gap beside the single yellow candle in the eastern corner. The air was nearly still; the circle of flames danced slowly on their wicks, casting small shadows on the grass. “Are we ready?” he asked, gazing at Linkara with concern. His eyes flicked up to Linkara’s bare head, but he didn’t say anything.

“Ready as I’m going to be,” Linkara sighed, “and I don’t want to keep everyone else waiting.”

Glancing up at the door, Oan called, “Todd, get them lined up and then bring them out.”

“Give us a sec. We’ve got one more - never mind, she’s back.” Todd’s voice dropped in deep concern. “Lupa, are you going to make it through okay? No one’s going to give you crap if you decide you can’t. If they do, I’ll punch them for you.” He paused; the three officiants couldn’t hear the reply. “Sure, if you say so.” Todd raised his voice again. “Okay, make a single file line behind the Critic. Don’t forget to take your shoes off before you come out. There’s a box of candles on the picnic table; pick up one as you pass by. Start walking as soon as I start playing.”

Todd and Sci-Fi Guy stepped out onto the patio. Sci-Fi Guy unfolded a director’s chair and a TV tray off to the side, setting up his laptop and what appeared to be a pair of rabbit-ear antennae. Todd sat down at the keyboard and hit the power switch, checking his settings. He glanced up, presumably at Linkara; in his hood and mask, he looked the part of a coven’s drummer far better than Linkara had expected.

Linkara dug a rectangular block of incense out of his pocket and dropped it onto the charcoal. As the pale blue smoke billowed out, he nodded to Todd, and the pianist’s hands fell onto the keys, playing a simple heartbeat rhythm on two drum voices in unison.

The back door swung open. Critic stuck his head through and looked around, mouthing “Ready?” at Linkara, who nodded and beckoned him forward. The Critic straightened up and headed for the picnic table at a brisker-than-stately pace, gesturing at the line behind him.

Linkara gently waved the censer at the end of its chain, wafting a cloud of fragrant smoke at each of his friends and fellow reviewers as their candles were lit from the one Oancitizen now held. As the impromptu covenmates passed clockwise around the circle, Maven dipped a sprig of rosemary into a bowl of water and sprinkled it at them; after nearly putting Film Brain’s candle out, she aimed specifically at head-height.

Phelous ended the line, with Obscurus Lupa right in front of him. His hair was wet, and he smelled of soap and aftershave. Well, no reason not to cross the veil without a shower, Linkara realized. As Phelous passed, Oancitizen replaced the last four candles into the ring and lit them, completing the circle.

Linkara carried the censer back to the altar and set it on the corner closest to where the Critic stood. Circling around, he picked up the hunting knife that would serve as the ceremonial dagger, feeling its weight uncomfortably in his hand. Turning towards the east, he swept the knife cleanly through the air in several swooping arcs, tracing the sigil that lay on the ground in front of the Critic into the space above him as well. Linkara could just barely see the squiggles of the symbol taking shape overhead, glowing faintly against the deep blue of the twilight sky. As he finished, the sigil flashed into bright golden light for a moment, then faded again, to the gasps of the gathered reviewers; he lowered the blade and nodded to the Critic.

The Critic glanced at the index card in his hand. “Powers of the Wind, watchtowers of the East, I do summon, stir, and call thee up in our time of great need,” he proclaimed in his deepest voice, managing to sound solemn and even a little reverent. “Guard our circle and lend thine eye to our rite, that all may be done with wisdom.” He picked up the yellow candle at his feet, lit it with his own taper candle, slowly traced a five-pointed star in the air with it, and set it back in its place. “So say we, so be it,” he finished; a tiny breeze ruffled his hair.

“So be it,” echoed Linkara, and behind him Oan and Maven. Linkara brought the blade of the knife down and touched it to the Critic’s candle flame, then to Phelous’s, then Lupa’s, and on until he came to the Cinema Snob in the south quarter. He managed to meet the Snob’s gaze without flinching as he sliced a second sigil into the air above them; this one flared brilliant scarlet as he completed it. He brought the blade down, and could almost feel the Snob’s eyes on it, hotter than the flames it had just passed through.

The Snob cleared his throat. “Powers of the Flame, watchtowers of the South, I do summon, stir, and call thee up in our time of great need,” he called, and Linkara nearly gasped aloud; he’d forgotten how powerful and compelling the Snob’s voice could be, and he was bringing every potent vibration to bear on each syllable. It almost seemed like the candle flames drew themselves up to attention at his words. “Guard our circle and lend thy heart to our rite, that all may be done with courage.” He came down hard on the last word, and Linkara’s heart leaped into his throat as the Snob lit the red candle and traced a pentagram with the blazing light. “So say we, so be it,” the Snob finished with a ferocity that could have caught fire to the air itself, and it seemed like gilding the lily to echo it, although Linkara and his two assistants did anyway. The candles to his left and right flared bright against the gathering gloom.

Again Linkara traced the blade through the candle flames until he came to the western corner; again he carved a sigil into the rapidly darkening vault above him, and this one glowed ice blue against the darkness. He lowered the knife and met the Chick’s eyes, nearly the same cool blue.

Like the Snob, she’d memorized her lines, but she spoke them calmly, persuading instead of commanding. “Powers of the Sea, watchtowers of the West, I do summon, stir, and call thee up in our time of great need,” she said, and suddenly it was impossible not to believe that they would come, that all would ultimately be well, that everything would absolutely be all right in the end. “Guard our circle and lend thy voice to our rite, that all may be done with understanding.” She brought her taper down to the blue candle, then gently wafted it through its fivefold path. “So say we, so be it,” she crooned, and out of the corner of his eye Linkara saw Nella visibly relax. The three officiants repeated it, and it became both a plea and a benediction as a stray spray of water from someone’s sprinkler system misted them.

A third time Linkara’s dagger swept through flickering motes of heat and light until he stood before the northern corner. The knife flashed against a backdrop of clouds and stars as it made the fourth sigil; power as green as grass burst through the lines of the humming blade. He stepped back and nodded to the Rap Critic as he raised his head; like Todd, the Rap Critic had donned a hoodie, and his deep eyes peered out from under it like moonlight on water.

Then he opened his mouth, and where the Snob had commanded and the Chick persuaded, the Rap Critic was intent on seducing the elemental powers to their aid. “Powers of the Earth, watchtowers of the North, I do summon, stir, and call thee up in our time of great need,” he rumbled, and it was clear that the sort of stirring he had in mind would, under happier circumstances, leave everyone involved deeply satisfied. “Guard our circle and lend thine arms to our rite, that all might be done with strength.” He lit the candle and fairly caressed it into a star before returning it to the earth gently. “So say we, so be it,” he murmured, and both Maven’s and Oan’s voices seemed to have picked up a touch of the same velvet as they replied behind Linkara. The shrubs that ringed the yard rustled gently.

Blade out, Linkara carefully paced the last quarter circle, concentrating on the power raised by the sigils and invocations as the knife kissed each dancing candle flame. He turned to face the Critic once more and gestured, arms sweeping out and up, palms turned flat outward. “Circle, contain us, protect us, hold the power we raise until the proper time,” he called out, and _pushed_ outward. A mote of blinding white light flared and raced around the circle, just beyond the candles, illuminating a ghostly dome bound with the four elemental runes; the sigils on the ground flashed in return, changing from flour to liquid starlight.

So far, so good. Now came the hard part.

Linkara turned one space towards Phelous. “Brothers and sisters,” he recited, “we stand here together to turn back an ill-fated wandering star that brings us doom. For so great a task, we must ask one of us, brother or sister of our hearts, to lay down his life for the good of all.” His mouth went dry again, but he continued, “Stands there one among us so willing?”

Film Brain’s hand started to rise; the Critic turned sideways and kicked him in the shin before he could speak.

Phelous visibly restrained himself from rolling his eyes and took a step forward. “I’m willing,” he said, his eyes settling on Linkara rather than the dagger.

“Do you enter into this contract in full understanding that your very heart’s blood will be spilt, your soul consumed, in the completion of the rite?” Linkara continued.

“Yes, I do,” Phelous said, his voice stronger this time.

Linkara presented the dagger and tried to keep his hands from shaking. “If it is your will that you be offered as a right and proper sacrifice, then swear upon the instrument of your death.”

Phelous licked his lips; apparently Linkara wasn’t the only one with a dry mouth. Slowly, Phelous’s right hand settled on the flat of the blade. “This is my true will,” he said, pronouncing every word carefully. “So I swear, on this blade, on my own heart’s blood, and on all I hold dear.” He glanced at Lupa, then at the Snob, then upward. “So say I, so be it,” he finished.

“So be it,” Linkara echoed, and was surprised to hear not only Oan and Maven, but the entire ring say it with him. A shiver raced down his spine as he lowered the dagger and gestured Phelous forward.

Carefully, they stepped into the inner circle. Oancitizen fished the butane match from a fold of his robe and began lighting the smaller ring of candles. Maven did a half-spin that made her skirt flare out, then put one hand on Phelous’s chest. “Did he tell you we need to strip you to the waist?” she whispered.

“Not exactly,” Phelous answered, “but he said he was going to paint something on me, so I figured.” He fumbled with his waistband, untucking his shirt as Maven tugged the collar over his head. She roughly folded it in quarters and stowed it underneath the altar as Oancitizen finished the last candle; she handed Oan a length of well-worn hemp rope and untangled it from a second, slightly longer one.

“Do I just lie down?” Phelous asked. Linkara nodded, watching the outer circle while Oan and Maven stretched Phelous out on the planks and bound him. Linkara couldn’t help noticing that Oan’s knots were both very neat and very secure; Phelous probably could have kicked his feet loose from Maven’s, but his hands weren’t going anywhere.  
Not that Linkara expected Phelous to lose his nerve and bolt. If anything, Phelous seemed even more sedate than usual. He’d have chalked it up to the bourbon, except that Phelous had been perfectly steady on his feet. Linkara set the knife down on the edge of the altar; he wouldn’t need it again until the climax of the ritual.

Oancitizen made a yawning noise that might have been something like a vocal warm-up. Linkara turned outward to face the circle, more or less in the Chick’s direction; he’d gotten flipped around - he’d meant to face Todd, who was between the Critic and the Rap Critic. He trusted Oan to cue their drummer, though, so it wasn’t a problem. He raised his hands, and heard the collective intake of breath as the chant began.

As they finished the verse for the first time, everyone blew out their tapers at once and set them between the jar candles. Hands joined hands in a ring, just inside the circle, and the heartbeat shuffle Todd was playing guided their feet around as they sang. The rehearsal had definitely helped; no one tripped, and almost no one dropped out of the song.

The sensation that engulfed Linkara was not entirely unlike being submerged in warm water. Sounds outside the circle seemed to be coming from a long way away, and shifted down in both pitch and volume. The power was already starting to build in the circle, spinning slowly with the coven of reviewers between the two rings of candles; it made his skin tingle, his bones ache, and his hair stand on end.

They’d only just started. This was going to be overwhelming before it ended.

Linkara turned to (Phelous/the sacrifice) . . . 

What the heck was that?

He refocused. He needed to (paint the sigils on Phelous/prepare the sacrifice for discorporation) - 

Linkara blinked and tried to read the inside of his skull. The power of the spell was already making his head hurt, and now that it was started, it was as if the spell itself wanted to be cast, like it knew it was needed - and was using his grey matter to think with, to cast itself, almost.

His hands were already on the bottle of red ink; he didn’t remember picking it up. He watched as his fingers unscrewed the cap, as he dipped his index finger into the scarlet liquid and traced the first symbol on Phelous’s breastbone.

That was not okay. Linkara was painfully aware now that he could just trance out, sleepwalk through the ritual, but it would be far more potent if it were guided by his will rather than this disembodied memory of castings past. And it seemed unfair to Phelous for Linkara to skip out on the hard part.

He picked up the blade and drew it across his left palm; the pain as the knife bit into his flesh brought him back to something close to normal consciousness. He noticed both Oan and Phelous staring wide-eyed at him, although they were both still singing. He trailed a fingertip through the blood and began marking Phelous again, tracing the ancient runes on his skin. There would be some sacrifice of his own to this, at least.

The chant kept winding around and around as he laid down the sigils. Linkara began muttering the ancient words of power, in no language known to modern scholars and full of long, high vowels. The pain in his hand was echoed by the pressure in his head and the pangs in his chest as the magic flowed around and through him, taking bits of his life energy with it. That last sensation was largely new to him, but wearing the hat in a rite that required pain and sacrifice and death would have been nothing less than mockery, and in a strange way, the pain kept him focused, or at least kept him from slipping under the spell’s influence completely.

The last sigil wandered up Phelous’s midline to his throat. As Linkara trailed his fingers across his skin, it occurred to him that in any other context, the touch would have been sensual. As sparks of life stuttered from Phelous’s skin and joined the glow amassing in the inner circle, they skated along the edges of Linkara’s aura, and the fleeting thought chased across his mind that it was a pity this spell was death magic and not sex magic.

Was that him or the spell thinking that? Or maybe Phelous’s thoughts leaking through? It was all starting to run together in Linkara’s mind; he’d never handled a circle of power this big before. Already, he knew he wasn’t handling it alone; he could feel Oancitizen’s aura behind him, supporting him with his voice, and more distantly the four quarter-callers keeping the power inside the circle as it tried to escape. That pulsing in his chest beside his own heartbeat might have been Todd keeping the rhythm; there were other presences in his head, too, humans and memories and perhaps more besides.

A few reviewers were gasping as the rhythm picked up and more life energy tore out of them. _Not too much from anyone,_ Linkara thought outward, as if he were giving the spell instructions, or maybe reassuring them. They’d all be fine in a few days. He wasn’t sure if the deep burning in his own chest was the same thing, or his moral qualms fighting with the inertia of the spell. His brain felt like a balloon stretched tight and about to burst.

Again he gripped the (hunting knife/sacrificial dagger), raising it above his head and trying to aim. In the blinding whirlpool of light, it was difficult to see straight, or maybe he was crying, he wasn’t sure. His arm seemed to lock in place, caught between the eternal “I can’t” of his guilt and the inexorable “I will” of the spell’s own memory. He could feel other hands touching his, ghostlike and steady, waiting for him to move.

He looked down through the vortex and met Phelous’s burning gaze. Under the chant, under the wild not-sound of the power whirling around and through them and the dozens of voices, Phelous looked up and gave Linkara a faint, sardonic smile.

“Now. I’m ready,” he whispered.

Linkara squeezed his eyes shut and brought the knife down with all his might.

* * *

Blood, so much blood, this would never wash out - 

Phelous’s eyes were wide open, and he was _screaming,_ and red light was pouring from his eyes, from the open wound, everywhere, even right through his skin.

So much blood, so much power!

Linkara felt himself fall to his knees, but his own body was almost irrelevant at this point. He reached out with his mind, with his aura, gathering everything from the circle and everything that was pouring out of Phelous, all the energy into a single cannonball, missile, rocket.

He was used to firing Margaret. She was a nearly infinite source of power, doled out in single bursts that could stun a man without injuring him, or cripple a limb but leave a man alive, or kill a man instantly. She was a soul forged into a weapon, and a damned good one.

Margaret had been a child, an innocent. She had been sheltered and kept pure for her eventual sacrifice. She had died terrified, betrayed; she had been slaughtered by those she trusted most, tortured for an ultimate purpose not her own.

Phelous was an adult, an experienced one. He had watched all the horrors the human imagination could dream up and put to film, and few had succeeded in scaring him. For all that he seemed aloof, he had loved deeply, and been loved in return. He had gone willingly to his death, had suffered as little as possible under the circumstances, and he was so practiced at dying that he had barely noticed when his heart had stopped.

Margaret’s soul was the most powerful handgun Linkara could imagine wielding.

Phelous’s soul was a nuclear warhead that could, and would, shatter planets.

Oan’s mind moved at the edge of Linkara’s consciousness, handing him something. Numbers? The coordinates of the rogue planetoid, from Sci-Fi Guy by way of Paw. Linkara shifted, focusing the immense power that was the essence of Phelous like a lens. He let Oancitizen and Paw turn him, aim him. He swept up the maelstrom of power that spun through the circle and let it wrap around itself until it was small

enough

to

_fire_

\---

He had to be moving at light-speed or close to it; this didn’t make any sense otherwise, because he was already well above the atmosphere, and the Earth dwindled away behind him in seconds.

 _Coming along for the ride? Or are you hedging your bets?_ Phelous vibrated.

So Phelous’s consciousness was still here; he shared that with Margaret, at least. _I think you pulled me out,_ Linkara sent back. _I didn’t tag along on purpose._

 _You were still holding on when the spell let go,_ Phelous answered. _I don’t think I understood how fast this was all going to happen at the end._ He paused as they passed the moon’s orbit, glimpsing part of its hidden side off to their right. _It’s fine, though. I think I’m glad you’re here. I kind of want someone else to see this._

Linkara didn’t have his body with him, so he was perceiving everything with his magic sense rather than visible light. At least, he thought that was what was going on. From his perspective, he was trailing like a kite’s tail behind a massive comet of raw magical power, easily twice the size of Comicron-1. 

It was red, which was the only way it resembled Phelous visually. Canadian flag red, Linkara realized.

 _Really?_ Phelous sent back. _Huh. I didn’t do that on purpose._

 _That’s always been your primary aura color,_ Linkara replied. _It goes with your shirt, at least._

Despite how fast they must have been moving, now that the Earth and the moon were barely more than dots behind them, it was difficult to get a sense of motion. The coordinates Paw had transmitted rang in his ears, or would have if his ears had been here; they had to be closing in on them.

 _There’s the fucker,_ Phelous growled, and adjusted his course slightly.

Indeed it was. Film Brain had been right when he’d called it a dwarf planet instead of an asteroid; it was big enough that one could imagine domed cities, mining colonies, permanent habitations on it. You’d have to bring your own air, of course, but it would have everything else - ice for water, carbonaceous rock for dirt, iron and nickel for building. But it had no atmosphere; it was barren as the moon, maybe more so. Linkara had only the barest sense of waste about it, a tiny pang of regret.

Phelous apparently had no such maudlin thoughts. _Threaten my country and my planet, will you, fucker?_ he snarled.

Seconds to impact. Linkara felt himself trying to flinch, despite not having any muscles to do it with.

 _Tell Lupa and Snob I’ll miss them,_ Phelous sent. Then he let go of Linkara and dove for the heart of the deadly planetoid, roaring like an entire pride of lions.

The ball of magic impacted the surface and splashed, sending waves across the surface as its brilliant core burrowed deep into the rock. Within seconds, the planetoid was engulfed in shimmering crimson, and then suddenly it wasn’t a planetoid anymore. 

It didn’t so much explode as disintegrate. Molecule was stripped from molecule; chemical bonds were shattered; carbon burned, despite the lack of air. In barely more than an instant, a small world turned into a rapidly expanding cloud of gas, ash, and dust, as Phelous laughed in the center of the inferno.

The shock wave caught Linkara short and flung him earthward. He saw the blue marble approaching even more rapidly than they’d left it, and hoped that he’d land at least somewhere close to his body.

\---

It wasn’t until everyone wasn’t in his head anymore that Oancitizen realized that they had all been there.

Linkara had finished the binding part of the spell, and Oancitizen hadn’t needed to signal Todd to start an accelerando; he’d slipped easily into a descant on top of the chant as the reviewers spun round and round, and there had been no point in trying to shield the Snob’s view, because _he_ could still see what was going on, and Phelous and Linkara even more so, and they were all seeing with each other’s eyes.

They’d all felt the hilt in Linkara’s hand. They’d all felt the blade in Phelous’s chest. He’d screamed for all of them, and many of them had cried out for him.

They’d all heard Sci-Fi Guy frantically repeating the coordinates in Paw’s headphones, and they’d all spun Linkara’s mind in the right direction, like the motor in a telescope turning the lens to the right declination.

And then they were gone, Phelous and Linkara were both gone, and Oancitizen was alone in his own skull again.

He blinked, taking stock of the situation. Phelous was clearly dead; the spell was unbroken, and Oancitizen apparently still shared some of Linkara’s magical perception, because the body looked _empty_ in a way none of the living ones did. Linkara had collapsed on the ground and also looked strangely empty, but he still had an aura, if a dim one, and moreover he was still breathing. Perhaps he’d fainted. Well, who could blame him?

The reviewers had stopped where they were when the coven-mind had broken; a few of the less athletic had dropped to the ground, exhausted from the dance and the expenditure of life-force the spell had demanded. The rest were looking around frantically, faces white with shock.

The Critic cleared his throat and waved, catching Oan’s attention. “Um, are we done?” he asked.

“Not quite, I think,” Oan answered. “Does anyone have any voice left?” He inhaled and toned a single note, low and reassuring (he hoped). A ragged chorus of voices from around the circle joined him, rising and falling as individuals dropped out to take a breath and then rejoined.

Sci-Fi Guy jerked out of his chair as if he’d been shocked, whirling around to face northeast, near the horizon. Oan followed his gaze and then almost wished he hadn’t; a point in the dark of the sky flared from invisibility to a pinpoint as bright as Venus, then bright as the full moon, then bright as the sun, too fast for Oan to get his hand up to shade his eyes. It disappeared just as quickly, fading to invisibility against the light pollution of Chicago. 

“Was that it?” Film Brain asked, overawed.

“I believe so,” Oancitizen answered, and a ragged cheer went up from around the circle.

Linkara sat up suddenly, then wailed like a newborn and collapsed again. Oan dropped to one knee at his side, asking, “Are you all right?”

“Not really,” Linkara answered, a trickle of blood - probably his own - running from the corner of his mouth. His glasses had fallen off in one of the two falls; Maven found them and pressed them into his hand. “I don’t think I can stand up,” he wheezed as he put them back on; his eyes shimmered with remnants of blue and white light behind the red-smeared lenses. “Oan, can you close the circle?”

Could he? Well, if Linkara thought he was capable . . . . “I’ll do my best,” he promised.

The dagger was covered with blood, of course, both Linkara’s and Phelous’s; Oancitizen wiped it against the grass before gripping it properly. As Maven blew out the candles in the inner ring, Oan stepped across to the Critic’s station and re-traced Linkara’s steps from the beginning of the ritual in reverse, sweeping around to the Rap Critic’s position. He raised the dagger and followed the lines of the green sigil above him; the lines disappeared, absorbed back into the dagger as it passed.

The Rap Critic picked up the green candle again. “Hey, Earth, baby,” he said, as Oancitizen realized they hadn’t rehearsed this part, “Watchtowers of the north, thanks for your help. We appreciate it.” He blew out the candle and set it back down.

Oancitizen paced the circle, erasing the sigils in the west, south, and east, as the Chick, the Snob, and the Critic murmured a few words of thanks to the elementals. As the Critic blew out the yellow candle, Oan stepped past him and swung the dagger from head-high, down through the circle of white light that bound them all and into to the ground.

“Powers that have joined us here, I release you,” he sang, feeling the magic that remained in the circle flow through him into the ground below. The sigils on the grass flared white and disappeared. “Stay if you will, go if you must,” he finished. “Our circle is open.” He let go of the dagger; a final spark jumped from his hand to the metal and disappeared. Suddenly, he no longer had the strength to stand; he managed to sit down, crosslegged, instead of collapsing, but he was close to it.

The Critic stared wildly for a minute, his eyes darting from Oan to Linkara to the corpse and back. “Okay, everyone,” he shouted, clapping his hands together twice, “let’s blow out the rest of these candles and get back inside.”

A mumble went up from the reviewers, followed by a shriek from Lupa; she darted past Oan and the Critic, flinging herself on Phelous’s corpse with a sob. As if they’d been cued, several other reviewers began sniffling, crying, and wailing with her. No one else braved the gore except the Cinema Snob, who picked his way across the yard and stood over her and the body with his arms crossed, as if he were daring anyone else to approach them.

The Chick glanced at them, then at Oancitizen. “Can you handle getting Linkara back inside?” she asked, as the Critic began shouting at random people to get moving.

“If Todd will help,” he answered. “That last bit of thaumaturgy really took it out of me.”

“I’m already on it,” called the Rap Critic; he squatted down and tugged Linkara up into a sitting position, then slung him into a fireman’s carry, as if he weighed no more than a child. “I’m guessing we need to put him straight into a shower,” he said.

“If he’s awake enough for it,” the Chick agreed. “Okay, guys, get up, come on, we’ve got to regroup and then clean up this mess.” 

A few straggling reviewers stumbled to their feet as Maven put the last of the candles out. Oancitizen gathered the censer and the bowl of water, and they left Lupa and the Snob to their vigil.

\---

“How are you even still up, Critic?” Film Brain moaned from his prone position on the floor.

The Rap Critic and Todd in the Shadows had managed to shove Linkara in the shower, prop him up so there was no chance of him falling over, and then turn on the water. The polyester choir robe and the shirt and corduroys he’d been wearing under it were in a plastic bag by the door, waiting to be doused in bleach and then burned as soon as they were dry enough. Todd had returned with a change of clothes randomly grabbed from Linkara’s luggage, which he had barely had the strength to tug on; now he was sprawled in the Critic’s recliner with a soda in one hand, alternately nursing it and fighting to keep it down.

Lupa and the Cinema Snob were still outside. They and the Critic had untied the corpse, washed off as much of the blood as possible with a garden hose, and bundled the body in a clean plastic tarp. Lupa had been in as bad shape as Film Brain was, toppling over from exhaustion and grief; the Critic had gotten her a blanket and a lawn chair when she’d refused to join everyone else inside. The Snob had insisted on standing vigil over the body until they decided what to do with it, despite being wobbly on his feet, too.

The rest of the reviewers were, with the exception of the Critic and Sci-Fi Guy, not doing much better. The Rap Critic, Todd, and the Nostalgia Chick were physically functional; their roles hadn’t involved dancing themselves to exhaustion, so they were only suffering the aftereffects of their energy loss - mostly headaches, if the Chick’s icepack on the back of her neck was any indication. Oancitizen and Maven were on opposite corners of the couch, both wiped out; Maven was alternately nodding off and asking the few mobile reviewers to refill her glass of wine, while Oancitizen was curled up in a ball and trembling, as if he were going into shock. Sad Panda and Suede were sprawled on the sofa between them, and the rest of the reviewers had mostly collapsed on the floor. 

The Nostalgia Critic, on the other hand, seemed to be suffering few if any ill effects; he was pacing back and forth, occasionally issuing orders that no one else had either the strength or the inclination to follow.

“What if they come looking for him?” he fretted. “We could all get busted for murder. We won’t be able to tell whether there’s any visible blood left in the back yard until morning. I should have asked Spoony how to conceal that you’re in a cult.”

“At this point, aren’t people used to Phelous disappearing for a while?” Benzaie asked. “I mean, I never heard about the Mounties looking for him when he’d been dead before.”

“I don’t think it usually lasts that long,” Sad Panda pointed out.

Linkara shook his head listlessly. “It’s okay, Critic,” he mumbled. “My fingerprints are all over the murder weapon. I’ll take the fall for it, if it comes to that.” He took another swallow of the soda. It was some store-brand generic, and it tasted even more like malted battery acid than usual, but it kept his throat wet. “I mean, I’m the one who committed the murder.”

“But we were all involved in the conspiracy,” the Critic worried. “I don’t think there are any distinguishable footprints back there, but who knows?”

“You weren’t the one holding the knife,” Linkara pointed out. Disgust rolled in his stomach. “I was. I could _see_ when his heart stopped.”

Critic waved off Linkara’s self-loathing. “I’m sure that’s old hat for him at this point. We just need to have our story straight.”

Bennett the Sage heaved himself up to sitting with a sigh and a groan. “Where’s the knife now?” he asked.

Linakra and the Critic looked at each other and blinked. “Did you bring it in?” Linkara asked.

“I don’t remember getting it,” the Critic said, his voice uncertain.

Oancitizen uncurled himself enough to call out, “Unless someone picked it up, it’s still in the ground in the eastern quadrant of the circle.”

“Right.” Sage hauled himself to his feet and staggered out the back door.

The Critic wheeled around to begin pacing again and nearly walked into a doorframe. “Ungrateful bastards,” he grumbled. “We save the whole world and here they want to throw us all in jail.”

“Nobody even knows about it yet,” the Chick protested. “Stop yelling; it’s making my temples throb.”

“Well, we’ve got some good news,” Sci-Fi Guy interrupted. “I’ve got Nimue, Insano, and Angry Joe online here.”

“Do we have a status report?” The Critic leaped across the room and crouched in front of the screen; Linkara tried to scoot sideways in the chair so he could see, too.

“Indeed we do,” Insano’s voice proclaimed from the speakers. “My calculations based on the incoming data from Comicron-1 indicate that there is less than point-zero-one of one percent chance of any significant ecological impact from the remains of the planetoid!”

“Do you concur, Nimue?” Linkara asked. At least his voice seemed to be recovering.

“This unit agrees,” the AI said. “Incoming debris is sufficiently diffuse to pose no significant threat to any inhabited areas. Minor impacts in northeastern North America are likely, but none large enough to form measurable craters.”

A few “huzzah!”s sounded from the reviewers on the floor. Nella rolled over and hugged MarzGurl, who attempted to hug back and fell over onto her instead.

“It’s looking pretty good up here,” Angry Joe’s voice added. “There’s a pretty hefty debris cloud still, but it’s pretty much all hot gasses and dust, maybe a few chunks of rock up to fist-size that’ll burn up in the atmosphere. I’ve got the radar tracking for anything bigger, but your ship’s already done a full scan for anything big enough to trip her collision alarm and so far there’s nothing. If anything under her threshold but still big enough to be a potential problem turns up, I can take it out from here.”

“Sounds like you’re all doing an excellent job,” the Critic said, with a smug smile on his face.

“For SCIENCE!” Insano whooped; he seemed to be agreeing with the Critic, but it was hard to tell.

The Chick rolled her office chair over to just behind the Critic. “Joe,” she said softly, “is there any sign of - you know.”

Angry Joe’s face fell. “I’ve been keeping an eye out,” he admitted, “or, really, an ear out, with the radio antenna and the PKE meter and everything. No sign of him so far.”

She sighed, and Linkara cringed. “I was hoping,” the Chick replied wistfully, “that he’d at least show up as a ghost. He could do reviews of the old Space Ghost cartoon, or something.”

“No such thing,” Insano snapped. “There’s no scientific evidence for ghosts, just the physical forms of the undead.” The aim of the goggles shifted slightly, as if he were searching for Linkara in their camera. “Unless there’s magic involved.”

“The continued influence of spirits on the physical world after the cessation of function of their bodies is well-attested,” Nimue stated flatly. “This unit has on record 1,348 instances for which all other explanations of the observed phenomena require an even greater violation of the laws of physics.”

“If Joe hasn’t seen any evidence that Phelous survived,” the Chick observed, “then it’s a moot argument from our perspective.”

“At any rate,” Insano said, changing the subject, “the Earth appears to be safe, or at least as safe as it was prior to the rogue planetoid making its approach, which means I need to get back to my lab. Goodbye!” His image abruptly disappeared from the screen, leaving a blank space next to Joe.

“Well, thanks for the update,” the Critic said, sounding a little less cheerful than before. “I trust that you’ll do your usual violent but startlingly precise job on meteorite duty.”

“No problem. Let me know if anything turns up down there.” Angry Joe flashed a half-smile at the camera on his end, and his feed switched to a blue screen and test pattern.

“At least we did save the world,” the Critic mused, looking sadder by the minute.

The back door opened, and Sage returned, knife in hand. “This is the one, right?” he said, holding it up to catch the light along the blade.

“That would be it,” Oancitizen agreed. Linkara looked away; he never wanted to see it again.

“Good,” Sage said. “I’ve washed all the blood off of it that I can, although burying it up to the hilt got most of it. Now, we just need to muddy the issue. Linkara, you bought this with cash, right?”

“Yeah,” Linkara replied, trying to sit up. His strength was coming back, if slowly.

Sage looked at it closely, the hilt a few inches from his eyes. “And the mark on here is your monogram, correct?” He took a few steps towards Linkara’s chair.

“Yup.” Linkara let his head fall back against the recliner. “Like I said, I’ll take the heat for it; I don’t think we can pretend it’s not my knife. The clerk might even remember me buying it.”

Sage pursed his lips for a moment. “So we need to make it clear that it became not-yours at some point,” he thought aloud. “Some of the blood that was on it was yours, correct?”

Linkara nodded. “Yeah, from when I decided that doing the sigils in blood would work better than the ink.” He held out his hand, palm up; the cut had mostly closed itself, but it was still visible, a red line across his palm. “There’s probably a fair amount of it still on - on the body, too.”

The Critic shook his head. “No, I think we got almost all of that off,” he said.

“Then this is simple enough,” Sage said, grinning suddenly. The blade flashed out, and the line in Linkara’s palm suddenly welled up with fresh blood. Linkara yelped and snatched his hand back.

Sage smiled, watching the red droplets slip down the blade. “And now it has more of your blood than anyone else’s on it, and my fingerprints last,” he stated. “If anyone asks, I took the knife from you by force, and gave you that cut for your trouble, and when Phelous was last seen, he was with me and alive.” He tucked the blade under his arm. “I’ll hide this, separate from the body,” he continued. “There’s sure to be a river far enough away from here I can throw it in.” 

Linkara gaped at him as Sage wandered out of the room, humming to himself. The Critic and the Chick locked eyes and shrugged. “Someone needs to get some gauze for that,” the Critic demanded. “I’d prefer not to have Linkara bleeding all over my floor.”

“I think I can get it myself,” Linkara said, pushing himself to his feet.

“Okay, good,” the Critic replied. “Okay, while he’s doing that, I need everyone who can still walk to come with me. We don’t have time for a funeral; we need to bury the body before it becomes even more of a mess.”

“Where can we do that?” someone wondered in the back.

“Remember the woods we got lost in with the treasure map?” the Critic asked. “Ask That Guy has been burying various dead animals and human nuisances back there for years. There’s a spot no one ever goes, and he kept digging it up over and over without getting noticed. I think we can get away with using it one last time.”

Critic led everyone who could stand out the back door as Linkara stumbled back to the bathroom, a new trickle of red seeping into his shirtsleeve.

\---

He could hear them downstairs as they came back in. Apparently the Critic had sent them back in small groups; he must have decided that a large group trudging around the neighborhood in the middle of the night would be suspicious. Guessing from the painful groans, the lack of conversation, and the sound of running water in both the upstairs and the downstairs bathrooms, the first group was either the gravediggers or the pallbearers.

The next two groups to arrive spun off into the bedrooms. The sounds that emerged were equally consistent with deep, cathartic mourning, complete with wailing and gnashing of teeth, or with rough, possibly similarly cathartic sex. There was a time when Linkara would have been disturbed by the second possibility and the number of people in each room; for better or for worse, associating with Spoony and the Critic had broken him of that level of innocence.

The fourth group was definitely mourners, because the sounds of sniffling and sobbing wafted all the way to the attic over the continuing moaning and thumping from the bedrooms.

The fifth group might just have been Sage and the Critic; at least, they were the only ones he could hear. They seemed to be having a heated debate about what to do with all the candles. Someone asked a question about the melting temperature of the wax, and the next sound was the back door closing again.

Linkara looked down at the two items in his hands. The magic gun rested against one knee, seemingly quiet. Margaret had made it clear that she held nothing that he’d done against him, that he’d only done what had to be done, but that it was too painful for her to think about. So she’d withdrawn, quietly tucking her essence away until time and distance put a cushion between tonight’s events and her memories. The only saving grace was that she clearly understood that Phelous had volunteered, and that made it very, very different from what had happened to her.

He still had some of her father’s memories rattling around his head from when he’d thought he’d killed her himself. And he had to agree, it had been very different. He’d feared they’d be just the same, but the feel of the magic was different. Not better, at least not in some grand moral sense, but the victim being willing changed the flow of the spell itself.

The hat was in his other hand. He hadn’t realized how much it had been protecting him from; his nose was still bleeding off and on, his eyes were going to be bloodshot for days yet, and he had bruises where no one had touched him. In shielding his life essence, though, it also shielded him from the subtler effects of the magic, the constant shift of its ebb and flow. He wasn’t sure that was a good thing. He suspected that was the primary difference between Malachite’s stone and the hat, that the elder wizard still had all of his magical senses unencumbered when he used the stone, and perhaps that was one reason why Linkara was still, in some senses, little more than a dabbler in the magical arts.

That wasn’t why he had taken the hat off, though. It made practical sense in retrospect, but he’d originally left it up here with Margaret only because he’d needed the ritual to hurt. Protecting himself from the harmful effects of channeling so much magic while his friends ached and Phelous bled had seemed obscene.

He wondered whether his head would stop hurting so much if he put the hat back on.

The attic door swung open noiselessly. A hand, pale against the dark wood, groped towards the light switch and was caught short by another hand, shorter and wider. Two figures picked their way across the floor until they were silhouetted by the low, slanting moonbeam coming through the window.

The Cinema Snob sat down on a milk crate to Linkara’s right. Obscurus Lupa settled cross-legged on the floor to Linkara’s left, exactly where the Rap Critic and Phelous had been before. In silence, they each fell to contemplating their own hands in their laps.

Linkara tried to clear his mind, tried to think of nothing, but his inner monologue was having none of it, and neither was his inner theater. Instead, the last few moments of the ritual played on infinite repeat, with the little hater in his head marveling at how easy it had been, in the end, to bring the knife down.

 _Did you enjoy it, Linkara?_ said that internal voice that sounded an awful lot like Mechakara’s. _I knew another you who would have. Are you really so different?_

Something warm splashed on his forearms. Linkara opened his eyes, expecting to see blood, but no, it was clear. He fought to keep his breathing under control; he wasn’t even crying for Phelous, he was crying for his own stupid selfish self, and damned if he was going to be that self-indulgent in front of the bereaved.

A strangled sob tore itself from the Snob’s throat. Linkara’s head swung as he looked over, wild-eyed; the Cinema Snob had his head in his hands, wetness glistening where his palms met his face.

Lupa wiped her eyes on the back of her hand and sniffled.

Suddenly they were all three in Linkara’s space, arms around each other, sobbing and gasping and holding tight. Lupa burrowed her nose into a fold of Linkara’s jacket; he found his left hand squeezing the Snob’s shoulder. They bawled like children, snot-nosed and red-eyed, until Lupa ran out of tears, collapsing with her head in the Snob’s lap and most of her midsection in Linkara’s. The two men struggled to pull together some semblance of dignity, with the help of Linkara’s handkerchief and the pocket square from the Snob’s jacket.

Linkara dabbed at his eyes again and jammed the handkerchief back into his pocket. “It’s okay if you guys hate me,” he mumbled. “I understand. You don’t have to forgive me.”

Lupa let out a bark of laughter, bitter and dark. “Like we could manage that,” she grumbled.

“It’s hard to hate someone who saved the whole fucking planet,” the Snob replied. “You, or that Canadian dipshit.”

“What?” That last turn had given Linkara conversational whiplash.

Lupa sighed and sat up, her hair falling in tangles around her face. “It was his choice,” she said flatly. “He made a decision, he thought it was for the best, and he went through with it. I may be angry at him for it, but I have to respect that.” She glanced out of the tiny window. “I mean, obviously it worked, so yeah.”

The Snob turned to wrap an arm around her waist, then looked off into the middle distance. “I wouldn’t have volunteered to help if I were going to hate you for it,” he pointed out. “Hell, maybe I volunteered so that I wouldn’t hate you for it.” He paused, his eyes unfocusing for a moment. “How much of the end do you remember? Once your eyes started glowing, I wasn’t sure it was just you in there anymore.”

“Glowing?” That was news to Linkara. “When did that happen?”

“Right about the time you sliced your hand open and everyone felt it,” Lupa replied.

Linkara blinked. He did vaguely remember the inside of his head getting more crowded just before that. “Everyone felt it?” he repeated. That might explain the startled looks on Oan’s and Phelous’s faces; he’d thought it was just the impulsive act of self-harm.

“We were . . . ,” Lupa started, then stopped, frowning. “Is there a word for that? The best thing I can come up with is ‘communing,’ and I don’t think that’s exactly right.”

The Snob shrugged. “The chanting, all of us breathing together, and the circle binding us - that did something. There was something more than just all of us there, and we were all together in a way I genuinely wouldn’t have thought I could stand with one other human being, much less around twenty.” His voice dropped. “Everything that happened to you, or to Phelous, we could feel. His eyes were glowing red. Yours were glowing blue.”

“I remember being able to feel everyone else sort of at the edge of my mind,” Linkara murmured. “I didn’t know it went the other way.”

“That’s one of the reasons we can’t blame you,” Lupa said gently. “We all felt what it was like to have the knife in our hands. We were all - with you, I guess. It’s hard to describe.”

“And with him,” the Snob continued with a hitch in his voice. “We all felt it when he - fuck it, I said I didn’t want to talk about this, why am I -”

“It’s okay,” Linkara said, reaching out to lay a hand on the Snob’s shoulder again. “You don’t have to tell me now. Or ever, if you don’t want to.” He searched for the right words. “But if you ever do, I’ll listen.”

Snob rubbed his eyes again. “I know,” he breathed.

Lupa managed to crack a small smile. “If anything,” she said, “I’m angry at Phelous for deciding to do the big heroic sacrifice thing when we already had one volunteer on the table.”

The door to the staircase swung open and deposited Film Brain onto the floor, flailing. “I’m sorry!” he shouted as he tried to pick himself back up. “I tried, I really did, I didn’t know he was going to do that, especially after I’d already offered! I tried to make him see reason!” His lip quivered. “I didn’t want him to leave you alone. I mean, I guess you’re not really alone, you two have each other. Or did it not work that way? I don’t really have much experience with those sorts of things, I’m sorry if I’m making assumptions.”

“Not that it’s really any of your business,” the Snob grumbled, “but yes, it’s a triad, not a V.” He looked more amused than annoyed. Linkara noted that Snob had still said it in the present tense.

“Anyway, I didn’t mean to pry just then, and I’m really sorry,” Film Brain finished.

“If you didn’t mean to pry,” Lupa asked, “why were you listening at the door in the dark?”

“He’s hiding from the Critic,” Todd said, and everyone jumped. “Whoops. Sorry about that,” he said, stepping away from the wall and becoming slightly more visible. “Didn’t mean to startle anyone. Anyway, Critic decided to finish off that really awful bourbon, and let’s just say weepy, horny bossman is not something anyone needs to deal with right now.”

The door swung open a little farther, as the Rap Critic arrived. “While I agree with Todd, I don’t think interrupting these guys while they do a little processing is the best move, Brain,” he chided. “Let’s find somewhere else to hide out.”

“Wait.” Linkara held up a hand. “Just - just a question. During the ritual, did you guys - could you hear -” He left off and stared at the Snob, not sure how to phrase the question.

“We weren’t all the way in your head,” Todd said, “but yeah, you and Phelous were both broadcasting, and I imagine we were sending signals back your way, too.” He fidgeted with the hem of his hoodie. “Actually, it was kind of nice not to be alone in my skull, or at least it would have been if it weren’t for the whole ‘planet in danger’ and ‘bloody sacrifice’ parts.”

Rap Critic hoisted Film Brain back to upright and gave Linkara a wry grin. “We all held that knife with you. There’s plenty of guilt to go around; no one needs to shoulder all of it.” He looked down at Film Brain with his eyes narrowed. “Or all the blame. Between you all up here and Oan down there, I’m starting to worry about Phelous not being the only casualty, and I think that would be seriously disrespecting him, you know?”

“I’m not having _that_ bad an attack of self-loathing,” Film Brain protested. “I know better than that.”

“Good to hear,” Rap Critic said, and stared at Linkara, Lupa, and the Snob.

“Like I’d be invested that much in anyone’s ass but my own,” the Snob scoffed, but he didn’t sound terribly convincing.

Lupa shook her head. “I’ll be okay,” she said; Todd took a step towards her, then stopped as Film Brain glared at him. She continued, “It’s going to hurt for a long, long time. But I’ll live. It’s the least I can do.”

Linkara met the Rap Critic’s gaze and held it. “I’m going to have to do a lot of re-assessing what I’m capable of, and whether I’m okay with that,” he admitted. “But honestly, I should be doing that kind of self-reflection more often. I tend not to, because it scares me.” He looked down at his hands, and at the bandage across his left one. “But maybe it should. Maybe scared is a place I need to learn to be more often.”

The Rap Critic turned to Todd. “You believe them?” he asked.

Todd pressed a finger to his jawline. “I think so?” he answered. “At least, I don’t think any of them need to be on suicide watch.”

Linkara grimaced. “Is Oan that bad off? I thought he was doing okay.”

“The Chick’s sitting with him right now,” the Rap Critic said heavily. “I think he just had a panic attack after the fact. He’s not much more used to blood off the screen than I am.”

Lupa reached a hand out to Todd; he grabbed hers as she hauled herself to her feet. “Maybe I can talk some sense into him,” she said. “Failing that, we could try calling Ven or Hagan, although Hagan might just traumatize him more. It’s hard to tell with her.”

“Hey, we just saved Haganistan, too; she owes us one,” Todd suggested.

Linkara shook his head. “Tell you what,” he said, “let’s get him and the Chick and go take a look at something. Maybe it’ll help.”

“What is it?” Film Brain asked, but Linkara shushed him, put his hat back on (the headache did not immediately go away - there was one question answered), and headed for the stairs as the others trailed single-file behind him.

Oancitizen was sitting on the floor in the kitchen with a bar towel pressed to his nose. The Chick hovered over him holding a glass of water and a paper towel. Linkara shot her a sympathetic look as he crouched next to Oan. “Can I help?” he whispered.

“I’m genuinely not sure,” Oan replied. “I think I failed to ground and center adequately. Whether that’s the case or not, I appear to have crashed quite hard.”

“Hey,” Linkara murmured, “it’s okay. You saved the world, Oan. I’d’ve never known what to do without you.”

“And now each of us bears a dark mark upon our souls,” Oan sighed, pressing a hand to his chest. “Oh, it’s worth it and I’d do it again, as long as the sacrifice was still voluntary. But it is heavy, my friend. I couldn’t have imagined it before.”

Linkara held out his uninjured hand. “Let’s get you out into the open air. That’ll help with grounding you, I promise.”

The group filed out through the back door onto the patio, followed by Nella and Maven. The back yard smelled of wet earth and trampled grass; the scent of blood was gone. Linkara found the dry end of the patio and lay down with his feet pointed a little east of north. Oan followed suit, and one by one the other reviewers either sat or lay on the cracked concrete.

“Now just feel the ground under you, and breathe slowly,” Linkara instructed.

A few minutes later, Oan shifted slightly. “That did help,” he said softly. “Thank you.”

“No problem.” Linkara’s eyes tracked across the sky, picking out constellations. It was late now, closer to dawn than midnight, and the light pollution had let up just enough to pick out the constellations of Draco and Cassiopeia.

The Chick sat straight up. “Look!” she commanded, her finger outstretched, as a streak of light raced across the sky.

“I guess the debris field picked up enough velocity from the explosion to get here a little early,” Linkara said. “It should be a heck of a meteor shower.”

Lupa and the Snob leaned against each other, and they all watched as shooting star after shooting star flared and went out again, until the leading edge of dawn twilight made them too hard to see.

\---

“Looks good, kid,” Harvey said approvingly as Linkara shut off the camera. “Might need to work on the sound a little; you might’ve gotten some extra reverb there.”

“I’ll be sure to listen for it,” Linkara assured him. “I’ll be doing the voiceover parts next. Anything else?”

Harvey pulled a note from his pocket. “Insano left another voicemail. Said just because you’d saved the biosphere, he wasn’t going to go easy on you the next time you meet. Pretty much the same as the last two messages, except more maniacal laughter at the end. You want me to call him back?”

“No, I think he just needs to get it out of his system,” Linkara chuckled. Getting back in front of the camera had done him a world of good; he’d felt a weight lift off his shoulders a couple of takes in.

Narrowing his eyes, Harvey asked, “Anything you want to tell us about the priority alert from the ship last week?”

“I told you,” Linkara answered, “we took care of it. I consider it a case closed.”

He’d given his home crew a curtailed version of the events at the Critic’s house, partly because he saw no reason to make them aware of exactly how much danger they’d been in, and partly because he was still processing it himself. Besides, he suspected that outside of the stress of imminent danger, the cold-blooded murder of his colleague and friend would look even worse than it had at the time, even if they decided it was ultimately justified.

Not that he’d been able to put the events out of his mind, exactly. 

Less than a day after his return home, the Nostalgia Chick had called him and ordered him in no uncertain terms to deal with Oancitizen before he had another death on his hands. Upon calling the arthouse reviewer, he’d discovered that the Chick had misread the situation rather badly. It wasn’t that Oan had slipped into another depression; rather, it turned out that the events had jump-started his magical senses, and he hadn’t been able to turn them back down to a tolerable level. Oan’s phrase for it was “having his third eye propped open.” Fortunately, he had once again done the research; he knew what to do, more or less - he just didn’t know how. Linkara had talked him through a few exercises, and it had helped enough that Oan finally managed to get some sleep, although not before giggling a lot and suggesting that Linkara’s hat would look better on him if he were a snail.

So now he sort of had an apprentice. Not that he felt particularly confident about that, especially since he was hardly a master magic-user himself, but he didn’t exactly have anyone he could refer Oancitizen to, either. And letting Oan fumble through learning how to handle the magic on his own was clearly one of the all-time bad ideas, even if it wouldn’t have earned him the righteous wrath of the Chick.

All that was on top of coming home and catching up on multiple reviews, dealing with the mess ‘90s Kid had made of the kitchen, and stopping a rogue cybermat before it became a traffic hazard. It had been an eventful nine days, even if it paled before the previous nineteen hours.

Linkara checked the battery on the camera and was debating whether to go ahead and do a couple of reshoots when his phone went off. He checked the number, then did a double-take.

He’d expected Oan, Spoony, or possibly Insano again.

Nope. The Cinema Snob.

Well, he had said he’d be there if he needed to talk. Time to make good on that promise. Linkara brought the phone to his ear. “Hello?

“So, you remember the situation we were in the last time we saw you?” the Snob asked. The background noise was loud and rather distracting - wind, mostly, but also several voices gabbling in the background, high and indistinct.

“I’ll never forget,” Linkara said simply. “What can I do for you?”

“Well,” the Snob continued, “there’s been an interesting development.” There was a gentle crunching sound, like footsteps on twigs, and the background voices got louder.

“Development? What kind of development?” Linkara checked the ship’s remote; everything looked clear there.

“It’ll be easier if I let someone else explain,” the Snob said, and Linkara heard the phone scuffing across something as it passed to another hand.

“Iiiiiiiiiiiii’m baaaaaack!” Phelous’s voice sang, and Linkara nearly collapsed onto the futon.

He clutched the phone tighter to his ear. “Phelous? How? I mean, thank God, but _how_?”

“Well,” Phelous drawled, “I checked this author’s other works out before all the shit went down, and first, she almost never writes major character deaths. She’s done it maybe two or three times, and only one was on stage, and that was technically an antagonist. Second, I’m pretty sure she believes in karma, so I figured the worst that could happen is I’d get reincarnated instead of resurrected this time.”

Linkara pulled the phone away from his head, blinked at it, then replaced it at his ear. “Come again?” he asked.

“Never mind,” Phelous sighed. “Let’s just say I figured that saving the entire planet would earn me enough karma that the powers-that-be would have to let me come back one way or another, and I had to figure out how to get back to Limbo from deep space, and then I got a seriously long lecture from the queen of the dead, but after that it was pretty much like normal. Just took longer.” He paused; the background noise resolved into Lupa and the Critic squealing at each other. “Can you guys be quiet for just a moment?” Phelous grumbled. “Anyway, that was it, and here I am back again.”

“I’m so glad,” Linkara said; he felt out of breath, as if someone had dropped him in cold water, but his heart was leaping.

“I figured you’d be happy to hear from me,” Phelous replied, and Linkara could almost hear him smiling. “By the way, you know with that stunt you pulled about not using the ink, we’re blood brothers now. That might get all kinds of complicated.”

Linkara looked at the line across his palm. It had faded from angry red to nearly white, and it was probably going to leave a permanent scar. “I think I can live with that.”

“You’ll have to. We’ll all have to. Good thing we have a planet to do it on. But if you come down with a bad case of situational immortality, don’t blame me,” Phelous noted. “Okay, I gotta go, because Lupa is climbing up the Critic like a jungle gym and I should probably go rescue him. I squished the flowers she brought when I was clawing my way out of the shallow grave he put me in, and now they’re both overexcited.”

Linkara laughed at the mental image. “I think they’re entitled.”

“Probably. If we can find a cheap bus line, we might come visit in a few days. Would that work for you?” Phelous asked. “I dunno if you want to add my observations to the spell, but it might be nice for the next sacrifice to know what to expect.”

“No, that sounds like a reasonable idea,” Linkara agreed. “Let me know when you’re on your way, and I’ll figure out which room is the guest bedroom.” He hesitated before going on, but it was going to burn on his tongue if he didn’t say it now. “I’m really glad you’re okay,” he finished. “All of you.” That wasn’t quite what he meant, but his team might be listening, and there was only so much he was willing to say in front of them.

“We love you too, Linkara,” Phelous said, and somehow Linkara could hear his eyes rolling. “I’m giving Snob his phone back, and then we’re going to hang up, so the Critic is going to have to use his own fucking minutes if he wants to talk to you, too.” The Critic protested weakly in the background.

“Anyway, you heard the man,” the Snob continued as the phone was passed back. “I don’t remember if you keep hard liquor around, but if you’d lay in a couple of bottles for me before we get there, I’d appreciate it.”

“I’ll send Harvey out for some of the good stuff,” Linkara promised. “I don’t think I can find Crystal Pepsi for you, though.”

“I’ll figure something out,” the Snob laughed. “See you soon.”

“Bye,” Linkara said as the phone cut out. He leaned back against the cushions and laughed until tears rolled down his face.

Margaret throbbed warmly at his side. Well, no wonder she was happy. On the one hand, hearing someone beat what took her out was probably a thrill for her. And on the other - well . . .

If the sacrifice was up and walking around, then no harm, no foul, right? Phelous might make a terrible Christ-figure, but it was enough of a redemption for Linkara.

Harvey stuck his head back into the room. “Everything okay, kid?” he inquired, looking Linkara up and down with concern.

“Fine, everything’s just fine, Finevoice,” Linkara answered, chuckling at his own joke. “We’ve got some guests coming, is all.”

“Anyone important?” Harvey asked.

“Only the most important person on the whole planet,” Linkara replied, and chuckled again at Harvey’s expression. “I’ll explain when they get here. Do you know if there’s a decent liquor store nearby? I’m not the best host in the world, but I’m feeling extra hospitable today.”

Phelous was back from the heavens, and all was right with the world.


End file.
